SECRET EXCHANGES
Long Prose
Copyright © 1980-2009 John O'Loughlin
_____________
CONTENTS
Chapters 1-10
____________
CHAPTER ONE
He was so
very pleased to be sitting in such close proximity to the paintings he had
specifically brought Gwendolyn Evans along to the Tate Gallery to view; to have
them all round him in a dazzling profusion of light and colour.
Yes, it was fundamentally here, with these
largely abstract-looking canvases, that modern art began. Here, with Peace, Burial at Sea,
Around the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries in particular, when Western man was in full-flower, there could not
have been the slightest possibility of an art arising which betrayed a distinct
predilection for the spirit - for light and colour over form and
substance. Had, by any quirk of
evolutionary fate, something approximating to a late Turner been produced then,
it would have struck people as a mess, not art but rather something akin to an artist's
palette - one that had taken a number of diverse paints and suffered them to be
experimentally blended. With the
nineteenth century, however, a great change came over the Western mind, a
change initiated by the Industrial Revolution, itself a product in part of the
Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent growth of towns and cities to a size quite
unprecedented in the entire history of mankind.
No longer was civilized man finely balanced between the sensual and the
spiritual, the subconscious and the superconscious
minds, but in the process of becoming increasingly biased on the side of the
transcendent - in short, to whatever reflected his growing isolation from
nature in the artificial urban and industrial environments he had created for
himself in response to evolutionary necessity.
From the nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly evident that
Western man had passed his prime as an egocentric being, a recipient of
dualistic tension, and accordingly entered a post-egocentric epoch of
transcendental lopsidedness, in which the influence of the superconscious
came to play an ever-more decisive role in shaping his destiny. Hence Turner's late canvases, which reflected
the imbalance that was characterizing modern man. And hence, too, their great importance and
significance to such eyes as could be expected, at this more evolved juncture
in post-egocentric time, to appreciate them - a greater number of minds, it
should be evident, than would have done so shortly after they were first
painted.
Yet, despite the eulogistic comments which Matthew
Pearce was making on behalf of the half-dozen or so brightly painted canvases
in front of him, Gwen's eyes weren't all that appreciative, her mind remaining
rather unmoved by them, even though, thanks in large measure to the esoteric
information being imparted to her by Matthew with regard to the general
direction of human evolution, she was now in a better position than ever before
to understand them. Had she been honest
with her boyfriend, instead of trying to please him by feigning enthusiasm for
the works, she would have confessed, there and then, to the sad fact that a
majority of the paintings on display in this particular section of the Turner
bequest left her stone cold, absolutely failed, for one reason or another, to
interest her. But from feminine tact,
which embraced a certain fear of what Matthew would think of her if she
disappointed him in this way, she did her best to appear sympathetic, to share
his unquestionable admiration for those exhibits upon which he specifically
chose to comment.
However, it was far from easy! For even with the best will in the world, she
couldn't bring herself to view paintings like Mountain in
Landscape and Sunrise with a boat between headlands through
the same pair of eyes as him. To her,
they seemed a mess. Too indistinct to be
worth taking seriously. There was the
suggestion of a certain scrappiness about them which violently conflicted with
her own classical predilection for neat, clear, well-defined works, such as she
had seen in some of the other rooms. One
might have thought the artist had gone mad, lost contact with reality to the
extent of being incapable of reproducing coherent forms, so vague was the
resultant impression! Such, at any rate,
was how she secretly felt at the sight of the more abstract-looking paintings,
not least those which she had seen in the previous room - like, for example, Scene
in Venice and Venice from the Salute, which had been
painted between 1840-45. And partly
because of this subjective doubt concerning Turner's sanity, she found herself
incapable of entering into the spirit of the paintings, unwilling to commit
herself to an enthusiastic acceptance of them from fear that she might
compromise her aesthetic integrity and became reduced, in her own estimation,
to the unenviable level of a bigoted crank.
With one part of her mind she remained defiantly aloof, self-consciously
superior to what she saw all around her, while with the other part she played
along with Matthew, responding to various of his pronouncements with an
appropriately complaisant nod, smile, or gentle grunt - a policy she was
subsequently obliged to adopt as much for exhibits like Shade and Darkness
- the Evening of the Deluge, Yacht approaching the coast, Light and Colour
(Goethe's theory) - the Morning after the Deluge - Moses writing the Book of
Genesis, which were hung on the large picture support at right-angles to the
wall they had been sitting in front of, as for exhibits like Sun Setting
over a Lake, Stormy sea with dolphins, and Snow Storm - Steam Boat off a
harbour's mouth and making signals in shallow water, and going by the lead
on the opposite wall, the extended title of which both baffled and privately
amused her.
Not that Matthew Pearce was unduly
garrulous or imposing, and therefore necessitated one's constant attention on
his conversation. Yet he was certainly
not a man to allow himself to be led from painting to painting at a rate
corresponding to the disinterestedness of his partner! On the contrary, standing or sitting in front
of a Turner from 3-5 minutes, as he devotedly did in a number of instances, it
was obligatory for her to fix her attention on the relevant painting for a
corresponding period of time, even when it wasn't of any particular interest to
her. A sign of impatience would almost
certainly have offended him, a cursory inspection of the other occupants of the
room no less than a tendency to flit from one painting to another independently
of his guidance and running commentary. Feminine
tact was enough to tell her this - now no less than previously!
Yet it wasn't enough to tell her that,
after a couple of minutes' silent inspection of Stormy sea
with dolphins, Matthew would suddenly change mental track and, for the first
time since setting eyes on the Turners, launch out on a swift stream of
criticism concerning the manifest turbulence of the scene portrayed, which he
considered the worst aspect of Romanticism and the one he could least
abide. For, to his way of thinking, the
turbulent was by nature Satanic, opposed to evolutionary progress towards
blissful passivity, and, for that reason, something to be condemned. "God knows," he continued, speaking
in a fairly quiet though firm tone-of-voice, "Delacroix and Gericault were worse offenders against 'the peace that passes
all understanding' than ever Turner was!
Yet that doesn't mean to say that he wasn't guilty, from time to time,
of following suit and producing works which, in their Romantic turbulence,
correspond to the demonic. That and the
one next to it, the Snow Storm, are typically Romantic in this
respect. They seethe with negativity,
with horribly tortuous activity. Not my
favourite Turner, by any means!"
He broke away from the canvas in question,
as though from an evil spell, and briskly led Gwen towards the next room, which
contained works by other English painters.
He looked quite stylish in his tight black denims and puffy
zipper-jacket, stylish enough, at any rate, to attract the passing attention of
two young women, who caused Gwen to look at him from a broadly personal
viewpoint herself and reflect upon his tidy, if informal, appearance. His dark-brown hair, gathered into a short
pigtail that gently curved down from the back of his head to his neck, had been
washed only the night before and looked perfectly docile. With his aquiline profile and large blue
eyes, he was certainly more handsome than the previous men in her life, which
was of some consolation. He was also more
intelligent, though not perhaps more highly-sexed. As yet, it was still too soon for her to get
him into proper sexual perspective, since she hadn't known him long
enough. But time would doubtless tell,
and thus enable her to extend her assessment of him to such matters as were of
specific importance to her as a woman, not simply as an intellectual.
Before entering the next room, however,
Matthew halted near the exist in front of one last Turner, a relatively small
work entitled The Angel Standing in the Sun, for which he confessed a special
fondness, deeming it one of the master's most spiritually noble productions - a
shedder of dazzling light.
"Admittedly, not one of his most abstract-tending works," he
softly remarked. "Yet the whole
concept of angelic transcendence and light is really too beautiful. Not altogether surprisingly, it was one of
his last works, dated 1846. I can't help
but admire its mystical symbolism. It is
virtually an epitome of the coming post-human millennium, of man become superman,
or angelic being, surrounded by spiritual light in blissful self-realization. For, of course, the essential light of the
post-human millennium won't be the sun, though that will doubtless continue to
exist in heathen selflessness for some time thereafter, but the light of spirit
in the superconscious - the clear, as opposed to
unclear or chemical, light. Yet before
his death, Turner left us this magnificently paradoxical symbol of mankind's
future destiny, one which will continue to shine in the hearts of men
throughout the coming decades."
He looked sideways at Gwen to gauge her
response, which, as before, appeared to be fairly sympathetic. She smiled back at him but remained
silent. She didn't have much to say,
since it was all rather bewildering to her, and he sensed as much from her
reticence. He sensed, too, that she was
probably too shy or reserved to talk in art galleries and was slightly
embarrassed by his speech. Nevertheless
he felt that he had to say something, if only to justify being in her company. It would have seemed stranger to him had they
gone through the rooms without exchanging a word, as some couples evidently
did. Hitherto he had always gone along
to the Tate Gallery alone and had remained wrapped-up in himself, enshrouded in
silence and thoughtful contemplation of the paintings. Now that he was accompanied by a woman,
however, he considered it his duty to speak, to offer comments on several of
the exhibits which particularly impressed or even depressed him. And, besides, he had a burning desire to
instruct, to enlighten, to expatiate. He
hoped he wouldn't be wasting his breath on Gwen who, after all, was an
intelligent young woman - intelligent enough to have gone to college, at any
rate, and got herself a teaching diploma in French, which she was currently
justifying in her capacity as French teacher in a south London
comprehensive. So, if that was anything
to judge by, she ought to be appreciative of the merits of a great painter when
she saw one, and accessible, moreover, to such evolutionary theories as he was
only too keen to impress upon her for her own good.
Leaving the last room of the Turner
bequest, they stepped across the threshold of the next room, which was divided
into two sections, one small and the other large, and were immediately
confronted by the turbulence of a huge canvas by Francis Danby entitled The Deluge,
at which Matthew quickly took umbrage for its Romantic ferocity - the sight of
so many twisted, struggling nude or semi-nude bodies endeavouring to climb to
safety from the rushing flood-waters onto the rocks and trees that lay to-hand,
offering the victims of the deluge a temporary shelter from the waters of
death. Not a particularly agreeable
spectacle, by any means; though a work of undoubted ingenuity, reminiscent of
the turbulent waterscapes favoured by Gericault, Delacroix,
and, on occasion, the great Turner himself.
Compared with John Martin's The Plains of Heaven, which was
exhibited, curiously, in the same section of the room, it was indeed a hellish
context, its violence in complete contrast to the blissful serenity of one of
Martin's greatest works, the only work on view of which the latter-day artist
would allow himself to think highly. In
fact, the three canvases by this artist on display here could be assessed,
according to him, on the basis of a descending order of merit, The Plains
of Heaven, being wholly transcendent, signifying the apex of tranquil
spirituality, The Last Judgement, with the Saved blissfully to one side
of the canvas and the Damned agonizingly to the other, presided over by Christ
and His angels, signifying a compromise between Heaven and Hell, and, finally, The
Great Day of His Wrath, focusing on a cataclysmic upheaval in which numerous
naked bodies were hurled with the falling, lightening-cleft rocks into a dark
abyss of raging hell, signifying virtually the furthest possible remove from
blissful tranquillity. One shuddered at
the sight of it, of so many panic-stricken people plunging helplessly to their
doom in the ugly black abyss between the sundered rocks! Romantic pessimism could go no further. The great evil at the root of life was
indubitably manifest.
"So far as I'm concerned," said
Matthew, suddenly breaking the horrified silence into which he had fallen in
the presence of this gruesome work, "the scene before us is positively
primeval in its cataclysmic turbulence, a record, one might argue, of pagan
man, or man tyrannized over by the moral darkness of his subconscious and
living in fear of a wrathful and largely materialistic deity. It seethes with negativity, it knows no compromise. Unlike the scene depicted in The Last
Judgement, which could be said to signify the mentality of Christian man, or
man torn between the hell of materialistic damnation and the heaven of
idealistic salvation, half-way up the ladder of human evolution in some
egocentric compromise. And there, at the
apex of evolution, one finds not a trace of Hell. For the compromise has been superseded, and
instead of seething negativity one has blissful positivity,
instead of death - life!"
He was of course referring Gwen's attention
to The Plains of Heaven, which he considered significant of the
culmination of transcendental man's spiritual aspirations. As yet, we were still too close to the
dualistic compromise for comfort; we still had a long way to go before
attaining to a life of transcendent bliss.
Yet we were certainly heading in the right direction, our spiritual bias
on the side of the superconscious was becoming more
evident all the time and would doubtless continue to develop over the coming
decades ... until such time as not a trace of egocentric dualism remained, and
we entered the post-human millennium - the heaven that John Martin had
ingeniously symbolized through a tranquil, otherworldly landscape peopled by
the Blessed.
Oh yes, there could be little doubt that we
were now closer to that heavenly culmination than Western society had ever been
in the past! We were no longer as
dualistic, thank goodness, as our egocentric forebears in the heyday of Christianity. We didn't give much credence to Hell. We didn't like the concept of
compromise. Still less what had preceded
it. The Great Day of His Wrath
could hardly be expected to attract all that many enthusiastic admirers these
days, least of all for its cataclysmic subject-matter! No, it was to The Plains of Heaven
that the enlightened modern man instinctively turned, eager to see there the
goal of human evolution. This painting
had relevance to him. The others didn't. This was John Martin's highest conceptual
achievement, a fact which Matthew was keen to impress upon his girlfriend as
they stood in front of the large canvas for about three minutes, admiring and
studying. And he was no less keen to
impress upon her the fact that, taken together, the three canvases in the
vicinity of where they were standing signified a summary of human evolution,
beginning with the pre-Christian, progressing to the Christian, and culminating
in the post-Christian - the wholly transcendent. A journey, as it were, from agony to bliss
via a dualistic compromise.
"Yes, I see your point," Gwen
admitted, smiling coyly.
"Psychologically, one could argue that The Deluge
is on a similar plane to The Great Day of His Wrath," she added,
turning back towards the Danby, plunging from the heights of Heaven to the
depths of Hell in a split second.
"Indeed!" concurred Matthew,
following her across the room.
"Although Danby does at least provide one with an angel weeping
over the death, it would appear, of a flood victim. Yet that's psychologically inept, in my
opinion, since angels shouldn't weep. As
symbolic representatives of transcendent spirituality, they should be incapable
of indulging in negative emotions. They
should pertain to the blissful tranquillity of Heaven, not weep like poor
wretches from a more mundane realm. They
should be spiritually consistent - bringers of love and joy. A weeping or angry angel would seem to be a
contradiction in terms."
"Well, Francis Danby evidently
considered it symbolically apt to have a representative from the divine realm saddened
by all the evil afoot," Gwen declared pithily.
"So it would seem," Matthew
conceded, smiling wryly. "Yet is
still strikes me as rather surreal, if you see what I mean. An angel in Hell? Very unlikely! Unless, of course, it was a fallen angel. But, then, fallen angels aren't really angels
in the true sense, are they?"
Gwen couldn't very well argue with
that! She simply moved on a few paces to
a canvas by Samuel Colman entitled The Destruction of the Temple (c.
1830) which, with its lightening-stricken crumbling stone and panic-stricken
inhabitants, appeared unequivocally hellish, unequivocally on a psychological
level with the pre-Christian.
Undoubtedly a very imaginative work, but hardly one guaranteed to
inspire one with any great confidence in the coming post-human millennium! Nevertheless, as they were about to take
their leave of it for the larger section of Room 16, Matthew elected to say a
few words in praise of the transparency of a majority of the figures therein
portrayed which, so he maintained, was agreeably transcendent.
No such comment, however, could he allot to
the Pre-Raphaelite and associated paintings which now confronted his weary gaze
as, reluctantly, he shuffled after Gwen and stepped into a world of late
Victorianism. Ugh, how he had come to
loathe the Pre-Raphaelites! How
reactionary they seemed to him these days, in light of what the Impressionists
had been doing in France at approximately the same time! How awful that, instead of reflecting and
justifying Western man's advance towards the superconscious,
they should have turned their back on the age to the extent they appeared to
have done, and consequently indulged in such fanciful illusions as were
ordinarily to be encountered in their works!
Pre-Raphael indeed! As if
salvation were to come through reverting to some largely medieval context of
rural simplicity! No, the medievalism of
the Brotherhood was indeed a chimera, a sham solution even by their standards,
a skimming off the cream of medieval mythology, romance, and sentimentality, a
nostalgia for things past without the knowledge or experience of true
medievalism, with its innumerable horrors and limitations.
Not that the Middle Ages were as black or
bleak as was sometimes thought by contemporary liberals. Yet they were by no means as agreeable as a
spell in the fanciful illusions of Pre-Raphaelitism might have led one to
suppose! Nor would they have offered one
much consolation for the upheavals of modern life. There was nothing particularly heavenly about
an age of mounting dualism. Nothing
charitable about the great castles which had been erected to protect the
nobility from fellow noblemen, popular unrest, and foreign invasion. Compared with the present, it was undoubtedly
closer to Hell, even given all the horrors and limitations which beset the
modern world. Yet the Pre-Raphaelites
didn't want to see that. They preferred
to turn their back on industrial progress and large-scale urbanization for the
sake of a comforting illusion which medievalism seemed to offer them. They preferred to think in terms of an
illusory Golden Age of the English past in which chivalrous knights came to the
timely rescue of beautiful damsels in distress, and people lived in harmony
with nature. They had no desire to learn
from Constable or Turner and follow in their progressive footsteps by adopting
a transcendental approach to painting.
That was left, on the contrary, to the Impressionists, those glorifiers
of spirituality in light and colour, those disintegrators of matter. The Pre-Raphaelites, by contrast, appear to
have had scant taste for spiritual leadership - assuming they would have known
how to recognize it in the first place.
Instead, they preferred to thematically regress not merely to the
previous century but some five or six centuries, and to paradoxically pretend
that such a regression was effectively a kind of progress. To them, an aristocratic society would have
made more sense than a proletarian one.
It would have corresponded to a Golden Age, whereas what was going on
around them in the industrial world signified a tarnishing of the mean, a
societal 'fall' from natural grace, which no right-thinking person could
possibly condone. Therefore back to the
days of old when knights were bold and England not yet ruined by
industrialism. Yet not as far back, it
has to be admitted, as the ages favoured by Poynter,
Alma-Tadema, and Lord Leighton, to name but three
historical painters. No, let us give
them some credit. They weren't that
reactionary. Five or six hundred years
merely - not a couple of millennia!
It was with some psychological displeasure
that Matthew Pearce observed the titles and subject-matter of the paintings on
display here, in the larger section of Room 16.
He was not at all resigned to what seemed like an enthusiasm for them on
the part of Gwen, who peered eagerly into the canvases, let fall a whispered
"too beautiful!" or a respectful "so choice!" every now and
then, as though to assure him that she had a fairly developed aesthetic sense
and was confident he would agree with her as a matter of course - a thing
which, to some extent, he was superficially prepared to do, since the paintings
here, as elsewhere, of the leading Pre-Raphaelites were of course generally
quite beautiful and obviously the work of highly skilled artists. Yes, naturally! No-one with an ounce of culture could
possibly deny that such exhibits had beauty and were accordingly deserving of some
respect. Yet all that was somehow
beside-the-point, painfully irrelevant to the evolution of modern art, and he
was disappointed with Gwen, after all he had said to her, that she couldn't see
it. To her, they were skilfully painted
representational works with noble subject-matter. To him, by contrast, they were traitors to the
age, down-dragging influences in an age of mounting transcendentalism.
Yes, of course King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Lady of Shalott, and The Knight Errant, painted by
Bourne-Jones, Waterhouse, and Millais respectively, were
accomplished works, done with loving care and an eye for detail. One couldn't doubt that! Yet how frightfully anachronistic they
seemed, how devoid of contemporary significance when compared with Turner's
most revolutionary works - works, for example, like Scene in Venice, Venice
from the Salute, or even Interior at Petworth,
the abstract impression of which was to set the tone for the next century and
influence all or most of the leading painters of the age! Could one say the same of the Pre-Raphaelites? Not if one knew anything about modern
art! Theirs was a lost cause, as lost as
that of the French Symbolists, with their fin-de-siècle decadence. From Turner, the torch of modernism had
passed to the Impressionists, especially to Monet, Sisley,
and Pissarro, and from them it was handed down more
diversified to the twentieth century via the Post-Impressionists, Nabis, and Divisionists who, in
their various ways, were to keep the belief in progress alive and weather the
storms of decadence and reaction which swept all about them. But The Lady of Shalott,
in front of which Gwen was now standing, rapt, it appeared, in wholehearted
admiration, had very little faith in progress and nothing to say to
modernity. The stream which bore its
heroine away from Camelot was only a variant on the current of reactionary
sentimentality which enabled Waterhouse, its Tennysonian
creator, to be borne away from the nineteenth century towards an imaginary
realm of medieval romance. There was
little about the work to suggest that a new era of human evolution had recently
got under way, superior to anything in the past. Strictly speaking, it wasn't an integral part
of late-nineteenth-century art. It had
no real relevance to the age. It had
simply been imposed upon it out of a longing for mythical escape. To Matthew Pearce, however, it was something
to be escaped from! He had no desire to
tally there any longer in the world of the reactionaries. He couldn't share Gwen's respect for Pre-Raphaelitis.
"But don't you like it?" she
protested, as he tugged her away from the Waterhouse, as though from a bedbug,
and made for the room's nearest exit.
"No, I bloody well don't!" he
firmly and almost categorically asseverated, not bothering to look at her. "I've no respect for down-draggers!"
She didn't quite understand him, but said
no more. She was disappointed that he
didn't share her tastes in art, yet in no way anxious to quarrel with him. She knew that he had his reasons and wouldn't
be diverted from them by anything she said on behalf of her own. She had to accept him. Yet she was conscious, as they walked back
through the earlier rooms again and on towards the main exit, that an
apocalyptic-like rift had opened-up between them - one doubtless born of their
dissimilar wavelengths - into which they were now tumbling, as into a hell of
their own contrivance. No matter how
hard she tried to learn from him and accept his views as her own, she couldn't
surmount her previous conditioning overnight, so to speak, and thereby climb
straight onto his level of awareness.
The words she heard him speak made no real impression on her soul. She wasn't ready for them. Her pretence of complicity in awareness had
been exposed in Room 16, and she knew he resented it. Now she was secretly angry with herself for
having allowed her natural response to the genius of the Pre-Raphaelites to be
aired in such obviously eulogistic terms, completely overlooking the fact that
Matthew might not think so highly of it.
Instead of continuing to play second-fiddle to him, she had suddenly
taken the lead, and it was not one that he had any intentions of
following. It had been a foolish
miscalculation on her part!
CHAPTER TWO
"Any
sign of them yet?" Thomas Evans casually inquired of his wife, as she
peered out through the sitting-room's large front windows onto the driveway
leading up from the wooden gateposts, some thirty yards away, to their front
door.
"Yes, I didn't think my ears were
deceiving me," Deirdre Evans replied, automatically turning away from the
windows. "They're half-way up the
drive." She hesitated a moment,
looked back over her shoulder, and smiled to herself. "I must say, Gwendolyn appears to have
found herself quite a good-looking boyfriend at last! Neatly dressed and handsome with it! That's not a combination one sees that often
these days."
"You saw it often enough in my
day," Mr Evans declared, putting down his newspaper and casting an
exploratory glance through the front windows - a glance, alas, which was too
late to catch the approaching figures outside.
For they had already reached the front door and disappeared from
view. The driveway was once again empty
and silent, its copious gravel no longer responding to the regular clump of
purposeful feet. The afternoon August
sun shone down brightly into the house, illuminating a patch of carpet and part
of the tea table to one side of the seated man.
At the sound of the doorbell, his wife had swiftly passed in front of
him, leaving, in her excited wake, a trail of patchouli perfume which tickled
his nostrils and, in conjunction with the swishing sound of her nylon
stockings, aroused him to a momentary lasciviousness. There was an expectant pause while the door
opened and then, characteristically, a gush of exuberant greetings, as mother
and daughter spontaneously embraced in the watchful presence of their guest,
whom Gwen duly introduced.
"So glad to meet you, Matthew,"
announced Mrs Evans, extending to the artist a small graceful hand. "My daughter has already told me all
about you in one of her recent letters to me, so I wasn't altogether unprepared
for you." She let go of his hand and
gently smiled into his face. "How
did the journey go?" she asked, in due course.
"Oh, quite well, thanks," he
replied. "The train ran on time
anyway."
"Yes, and thanks to the fine weather,
it was a pleasure to gaze at the passing countryside," said Gwen.
"Or such of it as is left between
London and Northampton," Mrs Evans remarked light-heartedly.
"Quite."
Glancing from the one to the other, Matthew
discovered that Gwen's face had very little in common with her mother's, other
than a slightly retroussé nose. For the eyes and hair of both women were of
different colours and the chins of different shape - Mrs Evans' curved, Gwen's
quite straight. One would hardly have
taken them for mother and daughter at first glance; though a more lingering
comparison might have led to one's discovering similarities here and there, the
most pronounced of which undoubtedly being the type of nose. Yet Deirdre Evans seemed further to elude the
status of Gwen's mother by dint of an appearance at once youthful and
seductively attractive, which suggested not so much motherhood as elder
sisterhood. In fact, Matthew was
somewhat surprised to find her so youthful-looking, though he assumed from
Gwen, who had just turned twenty-two, that she must be at least forty. In point of fact, she was thirty-nine, having
conceived her daughter at the tender age of seventeen, a mere six months into
her marriage. But such information
wasn't to be imparted to the artist there and then, as he stood next to his
girlfriend and endeavoured to compare the two women while they talked. He would have to content himself with guesswork,
which, in any case, had been pretty close.
Turning away from her daughter, Mrs Evans
suddenly said: "Now then, Matthew, come and meet my husband, whom I'm sure
will be delighted to see you."
"Yes, I'd almost forgotten about
dad," Gwen murmured, catching hold of her boyfriend's sleeve and well-nigh
dragging him in her mother's turbulent wake.
"He's evidently in the sitting room."
Which of course he was, and still seated in
his favourite armchair with pipe in mouth and the daily paper on his lap. He rose unsteadily to shake hands with the
visitor, cast his daughter a welcoming nod, and, no sooner than these social
obligations had been perfunctorily dispatched, gratefully relapsed into his
chair again, pipe still in mouth. One
might have supposed from his behaviour that the reception of a stranger into
his house was nothing out-of-the-ordinary, even if that stranger did happen to
be his daughter's latest boyfriend. At
any moment, disdaining ceremony or curiosity, he might have picked up his paper
again and carried on reading as though nothing had happened. But that was only a surface impression. For, in reality, he welcomed the prospect of
finding out what kind of a young man Gwen had got herself involved with this
time.
It wasn't therefore long before, having
taken the chair offered him shortly after entering the room, Matthew found
himself drawn into conversation with Mr Evans on the subject of Gwen, which of
course was common to them both, if from rather different angles. "She told me you wrote to her a few
weeks ago," Mr Evans stated, by way of an opening gambit, "and
invited her to meet you somewhere in north London, if that was possible."
"That's right," Matthew admitted,
blushing slightly in the presence of the two women. He wondered whether he hadn't let himself in
for some kind of interrogation on the subject.
"Hampstead Heath, to be precise," he added, for Mr Evans'
benefit.
"And you apparently hadn't written to
her for well over two years prior to that?"
"No, quite true. The previous letter I'd sent to her didn't
receive an answer, so I assumed she had no desire to contact me. I'd also written one even earlier than that
... about three-and-a-half years ago, but she didn't respond to that either. I didn't realize, at the time, that she might
have changed address beforehand and not had the letters forwarded-on to
her. Since they weren't returned to me,
I had no way of knowing. Indeed, it
didn't even occur to me to use the second address she had given me that day we
first met, namely yours - not, at any rate, until quite recently, when I began
to consider the possibility of writing to her again. I must have been too pessimistic about the
fate of the earlier letters."
"Which, presumably, had simply gone to
an address she was no longer resident at?"
"Yes, precisely! But I didn't discover that until we got into
correspondence quite recently, I having decided, after all, to send a letter to
her care of you, a letter which I must thank you for having forwarded-on to her
London address."
Mr Evans vaguely waved a hand in the
direction of the women, who were seated together on a nearby couch, before
saying: "Don't thank me, dear boy, thank my wife. It was she who re-addressed it."
Matthew deferred to Mrs Evans with a polite
smile. He was still feeling embarrassed
by the turn of conversation, but did his best not to show it.
"I hear you first met my daughter
outside Kenwood House in Highgate, north London," she remarked, taking
advantage of the artist's attention.
"Yes, a Sunday afternoon about four
years ago," he obliged. It was so
hateful to be reminded of the fact.
Obviously Gwen had spoken to her mother on the subject!
"And that was the last you saw of her
until a couple of weeks ago, when she met you in London in response to your
letter?" It could have been Mr
Evans again but, curiously, it wasn't.
"Unfortunately so," Matthew
confessed, feeling more than a shade disgruntled by this further example of
parental curiosity concerning his relations with their daughter. "Had she not changed address, a few
months after we met, I might have received a reply sooner. But she decided against notifying me, so I
continued to send futile letters to her old one instead. Since I didn't get around to writing to her
until some five months after our brief acquaintance, she imagined, in the
meantime, that I'd lost interest in her and that it therefore wasn't desirable
or necessary for her to notify me of any change of address. However, by the time I finally got round to
writing - and writing letters, alas, has never been my forte
- she had already moved house over a month previously, which is why
I didn't receive a reply."
"You ought to have written to her care
of us after that," Mr Evans commented, pipe in hand.
"Yes, so I realize," the artist
admitted, feeling still more disgruntled with himself. But he hadn't and that was that! He had ignored their address and preferred to
concentrate on the Norwich one instead.
It hadn't been a matter of life-and-death for him to contact her, in any
case. He had simply written out of
curiosity, with a vague hope of furthering their relationship in due course.
"Well, at least he wrote to me care of
you eventually," said Gwen, offering her admirer some moral support.
"Better late than never, I suppose,"
Mr Evans conceded. "Though you
could well have been deeply attached to someone else at the time and therefore
not in a position to answer it in quite the way Mr Pearce would have
hoped."
This was hardly the kind of suggestion to
win the latter's approval. Yet he
retained a discreet silence, in spite of its essentially baleful effect on
him. He was beginning to regret that he
had ever written the damn letter at all and wasn't still in London, miles away
from this rather cantankerous individual who sat opposite him with an
evil-smelling pipe in his mouth and an even more evil-looking newspaper on his
lap. Better, perhaps, to have forgotten
about Gwen than to have dragged her into his life again after so long. Yet, deep down, he knew that his recent
letter to her was virtually inevitable, insofar as he had no other woman to
write to and was still desperately searching for love. Gwen had not been his first and truest
love. As yet, she was scarcely even his
second. But she possessed the dubious distinction
of being the only woman he had met, during the past four years, who bore a
strong physical resemblance to his first love, and it was primarily for this
reason that he had written to her in the hope of establishing some degree of
intimate contact. His judgement had told
him that if he couldn't find his first love again - and he had no way of
contacting her since she disappeared from his life one sad August afternoon
several years before - he would be well-advised to find someone like her,
someone with whom it would be possible to form a deep and lasting
relationship. Hence Gwen, being the
nearest thing to her, had gradually acquired a special significance in this
respect, despite the relative brevity of his prior meeting with her and the
subsequent time-lag in their correspondence.
Had someone else come along in the meantime, to fill the void in his
love-life, he would never have dreamt of contacting her. Unfortunately for him, however, no-one else
had, so the void had remained unfilled.
Even now that he had established close
contact with Gwen and made her his girlfriend, he was far from convinced it was
being filled. For, as already noted, he
hadn't yet succeeded in falling in love with her and was privately disappointed
by the fact that, in a number of respects, she existed on a completely
different wavelength from himself, not, by any means, as spiritually close to
him as he had imagined, on the dubious basis of their first meeting, that she
would be.
That day, outside Kenwood House, they had
talked for ages about art and travel and religion and other substantial
subjects of mutual interest, and Matthew had come away with the impression that
he had at last met a kindred spirit - a person with whom intimate conversation
was possible. Yet now, all these years
later, it seemed to him that he may have been mistaken in his initial
impression or, alternatively, inclined to modify it in his imagination in the
meantime, since his recent relations with Gwen had exposed numerous disparities
between them and accordingly caused him to cast suspicion upon his previous
assumptions.
For instance, that afternoon at the Tate, a
few days ago, he had become gravely disillusioned by her manifest admiration
for and enjoyment of the Pre-Raphaelites, which seriously conflicted with his
own attitude, based on radically post-Raphaelite taste. She had only come to cultural life, it seemed
to him, when they entered the Pre-Raphaelite section of Room 16. Her responses to Turner, on the other hand,
had been decidedly cool, especially where the more abstract-looking works were
concerned. It was as though she didn't
comprehend the creative significance of what Turner had done and was
consequently all-too-inclined to undervalue his work, to see in the gradual
reduction of concrete representation a mess and incompetence rather than a
radical breakthrough to a higher level of spiritual awareness. Only with the more conventional early works
did she appear to have any spontaneous interest, to stand in front of them with
any degree of pleasure and occasionally make some eulogistic comment. With the later and less conventional ones, on
the other hand, it didn't take Matthew long to realize that she wasn't really
there, didn't really appreciate what they signified in the development of
modern art. She appeared to withdraw
into herself and clam-up, to respond but weakly to his enthusiasm. Even The Angel Standing in the Sun
didn't appear to make any great impression on her, no matter what he said on
its behalf.
Yes, it was evident that Gwen wasn't quite
as kindred a spirit as Matthew had initially imagined, or that if, by any
chance, she had once been closer to him, she had evolved in a different way
during the course of the past four years.
Of the two possibilities, he wasn't quite sure which one to attribute
more importance to, though he had a growing suspicion that the first was
probably nearer the truth. For time
could only be subordinate to essence, since people who were essentially alike
in their spiritual predilections remained so, no matter how long separated by
time. Still, it was perhaps too early,
as yet, for Matthew to dismiss Gwen as a mistake on his part, and he was
grateful, in spite of the cultural differences which existed between them, for
the friendship she had granted him. At
least that was something to be pleased about!
Meanwhile, the conversation had switched,
much to Matthew's relief, to the subject of art, and specifically to his art,
which Mr Evans seemed anxious to investigate after a rather cynical
fashion. "I mean, you're not one of
these abstract artists, are you?" he fairly snorted, momentarily removing
pipe from mouth. "One who throws or
flicks paint over the canvas and calls the deplorable result a work of
art?"
"Not quite; though I do indulge in a
form of Post-Painterly Abstraction on occasion," the artist confessed in a
slightly defensive tone-of-voice.
"What-on-earth's that?" Mr Evans
asked condescendingly.
"Well, it's a kind of simple,
geometrical abstraction employing only a few colours to create a predominantly
classical as opposed to, say, romantic type of modern art," Matthew
informed him. "One might argue that
it generally looks neater than Abstract Expressionism, since primarily a matter
of form rather than feeling. Essentially
an American phenomenon of the 'forties, it's now somewhat out-of-date, which is
why I don't indulge in it very often.... Art styles change very rapidly these
days, you know."
"Perhaps that's just as well," Mr
Evans averred sarcastically. "So
what do you generally indulge in, if that's not too sweeping a
question?"
"Well, I work in a variety of styles
actually, sometimes veering in the direction of Op Art, with the use of closely
knit wavy or angular strips of paint to create an illusion of movement, like
one finds in Bridget Riley. Sometimes
veering in the direction of still life influenced by Pop Art, with the use of
simple outlines painted in bright or matt tones of pure paint, like one finds
in Patrick Caulfield. Sometimes even
veering in the direction of Computer Art, with the use of more complex
geometrical shapes which reflect the influence of technology, like one finds in
Eduardo Paolozzi.
And sometimes making use of minimalist techniques, in which only a few
lines or dots or other simple forms are painted onto the canvas, and the result
is extremely simplistic, suggestive of a greater degree of abstraction than had
been achieved by most of the earlier abstract artists ... with the notable
exceptions of the Italian, Fontana, and the Frenchman, Klein, who preferred to
leave the canvas blank or to paint it white."
"And you call all that art?" Mr
Evans exclaimed, almost choking on his pipe.
"A blank or monochromatic canvas - art?"
"Certainly modern art," Matthew
admitted as calmly as possible. He had
anticipated some such outburst on his interlocutor's part. "The general tendency being towards
increased abstraction in one form or another, the most radical modern art
completely breaking away from the traditional three-dimensional, representational
concept of art."
"But why-on-earth does it have to do
that?" Mr Evans objected obdurately.
"Because it does," the artist
matter-of-factly stated, instinctively shying away from the immense abyss of
dissimilar awareness which had suddenly opened up, hell-like, between
them. He didn't have the nerve, at
present, to attempt bridging it, nor much confidence that such an attempt would
meet with any success. It was obvious
that the reactionary philistine in front of him had no real desire to find out
why modern art had to be modern. If he
had, he would have found out long ago!
No, it was perfectly clear that he was more interested in discrediting
it than in seeking to justify its radicalism in the light of industrial and
environmental change.
"But surely an artist should put
something recognizably artistic onto a canvas," Gwen's father protested,
before Matthew could add anything to his initial reply. "I mean, what's the point of a
monochromatic canvas or, alternatively, of a canvas covered in geometrical
patterns, zigzag lines, or whatever? How
can that have any relationship to genuine art?" He stared sternly, almost offensively so, at
his guest, as though wholly confident of the fact that he represented the voice
of sanity and the artist, if not insanity, then certainly folly.
"I don't know whether it has any
relationship to conventional art as such," Matthew replied, endeavouring
not to show his impatience. "But it
definitely has one to modern art. So far
as Western art is concerned, there are essentially three kinds, viz. the
pre-Christian, the Christian, and the post-Christian, each of which follows its
own rules within carefully prescribed boundaries."
"That may well be," the
pipe-smoker countered with an air of exasperation. "But the way I see it, a lot of modern
art simply isn't art."
"It isn't Christian art, so it can't
be judged by exactly the same standards as an art which was largely
representational," Matthew averred.
"You have to judge it from a post-Christian viewpoint - from the
viewpoint, namely, of twentieth-century transcendentalism. Then it will make some sense to you. But if you think that there's only one kind
of art, viz. Christian, and that all art should correspond to it and be judged
by it, then I'm afraid you're very much mistaken."
Mr Evans appeared to be taken-aback, much
as though he hadn't expected Matthew to rebut his criticism so
confidently. And he appeared baffled
moreover, evidently uncertain of what the artist meant by 'Christian art'. On the face of it the term seemed to imply
crucifixions, visitations, resurrections, and the like, with strictly Christian
associations. Was this so? He put the question to his guest.
"No, by 'Christian' I don't just mean
religious art," Matthew declared, "but any art, no matter how secular
its subject-matter, which was painted from approximately the 12-18th centuries,
during the period, one might say, of strong Christian influence. In other words, an art which is dualistic,
reflecting Western man's compromise position between the subconscious and the superconscious, rather than an art reflecting one or other
of the psychic extremes, like one finds in the pre- and post-Christian
periods. Therefore Christian art is
balanced between illusion and truth, the sensual and the spiritual, Hell and
Heaven, etc., through whichever dualities you care to name. It's largely a consequence of the
environmental position of Western man during the time he lived in a
more-or-less balanced condition between nature and civilization in his
towns. As soon as the balance began to
tip in favour of civilization and the superconscious,
however, Christian art started to decline and continued to decline the more
tipped the balance, so that only a post-Christian, non-representational art was
possible or, at any rate, truly representative of the age."
"I'm afraid I don't quite follow
you," Mr Evans confessed, not bothering to disguise his bewilderment. "I mean, what-on-earth is the superconscious? I
haven't heard of such a term before."
No, he hadn't. And it was almost as though one should
congratulate him for it, congratulate him for his ignorance and average
middle-class mediocrity! Matthew was
fairly annoyed for having allowed himself to get drawn into an explication of
art in relation to environmental transformations, for having given way to his
penchant for high-flown didacticism in this patently philistine
sitting-room. Yet, protest as he might,
it had been forced upon him by the necessity of justifying modern art and,
through that, his own work in the face of unenlightened opinion. He had no option but to continue, to respond
to Mr Evans' ignorance.
"Well, to put it as simply as
possible, the superconscious is the highest part of
the psyche, the intellectually- and spiritually-biased part of the mind as
opposed to its emotionally- and sensuously-biased part," he obliged. "It's that part signifying moral light
as opposed to moral darkness, good as opposed to evil, positivity
as opposed to negativity - in short, love as opposed to hate. It is spirit at its lowest and highest, the
spirit of intellectuality and the spirit, more importantly, of pure awareness,
of timeless bliss. The former on the
lower level, the latter higher up ... at the apex, one might say, of mystical
beatitude. Indeed, it has been contended
- and not without justification - that its topmost level is capable of
identification with the Infinite; that, through it, man can come to a direct if
partial knowledge of the Godhead; that the inner light is indeed commensurate
with the essence of spirit per se, and thus equivalent to the truth
beyond all appearances. For one can
experience an intimation of ultimate reality through the superconscious
mind if one so desires or, to put it more accurately, if one is in a position
to, that's to say, if one has the time, patience, inclination, and
determination to dedicate oneself to the cultivation of pure awareness. It won't come to one who hasn't properly
prepared himself in advance, who hasn't dedicated his life to regular and
sustained bouts of mystical concentration.
It has to be earned."
"Presumably as the fruit of
Transcendental Meditation," Mr Evans observed in an impatient
tone-of-voice. "Frankly, I'm afraid
I can't accept what you say about the superconscious
being capable of identification, partial or otherwise, with God. It has never convinced me, this mystical
theory of God as a state-of-mind, 'a being withdrawn', or whatever the
quotation is, with which one can get into direct contact. It all sounds too arbitrary. The fact of a superconscious
mind may be true, but I don't see that one should be led to infer the existence
of God from it. After all, there have
been other concepts of God as well, so what is there about this one that should
single it out for special commendation?"
"Simply the fact that it's true and
corresponds to ultimate reality," Matthew insisted.
"Oh, come now!" Mr Evans
protested. "Just because some
people - mystics or whatever they're called - believe it to be true, that
doesn't mean to say it really is so!
Some people believe Jesus Christ to be God, but so what? Does that mean that, ultimately, Christ
really is God? I've never thought so,
anyway, and I'm nominally a Christian, not a Jew, a Moslem, a Hindu, or
whatever. To me, Christ is simply a man
who happened to get himself taken for God in some parts of the world while the
legitimacy of an anthropomorphic viewpoint prevailed."
"In a sense, He's that for me
too," Matthew confessed, blushing deeply in spite of himself. For he was aware of the relativity of the
term under discussion and felt that, while Christ wasn't exactly ultimate
divinity, He was still divine to the degree of signifying a compromise between
one level of divinity and another, the Father and the Holy Ghost, and thus had
as much right, within relative terms, to be regarded as God as the other and
more extreme parts of the Trinity.
"Yet I don't see why one should therefore disbelieve in a
spiritually achieved intimation of God as the mystics conceive of Him," he
went on. "I don't see why a lower
concept of God, founded as much on illusion as on truth, should prevent one
from taking a higher concept of divinity seriously. After all, there are plenty of people, these
days, who are too enlightened to believe in God when conceived, say, as either
Jesus Christ or some white-bearded Creator lording it over the Universe. In other words, when conceived in traditional
anthropomorphic terms, and who therefore consider themselves atheist."
"I, for one!" Mr Evans declared.
"Yes, well, such people often imagine
they're above belief in God simply because what has hitherto been taken for
divinity fails to convince them," Matthew continued. "They come to a halt two-thirds of the
way up the ladder of religious evolution under the delusion that they've
actually reached the top or, rather, gone beyond it, transcended religion
altogether, and then flatter themselves that they're too intelligent to believe
in God. For it's a taken-for-granted
tenet of their philosophy that God, of whatever conception, is an illusion, a
figment of the imagination which a less-enlightened ancestry were inclined to
take too seriously. To them, religion is
a system of illusions or superstitions, beneath the dignity of an atheistic mind."
"Well, isn't that what it essentially
is?" Mr Evans countered, his face turning red with consternation.
"No, no more than art is or must
inevitably be," Matthew confidently retorted. "Like art, religion can be divided into
roughly three stages, corresponding to the nature of the environment and the
degree of evolution manifested in it at any given time. There's a religious sense largely founded on
the subconscious, which is dark and fearsome, involving propitiatory sacrifice
to a cruelly vengeful deity. It's the
equivalent of Creator-worship and is totally illusory, having no basis in
reality whatsoever. It isn't necessary
to slay animals or people to win the favours of this Creator-God for the simple
reason that such a deity, conceived in anthropomorphic terms, is largely if not
purely a figment of the imagination. Yet
those who exist in this pre-Christian context can't be expected to realize
that, since they're victims of the subconscious, unable to transcend its
dominion to any appreciable extent - least of all to an extent which would
enable them to see through their illusions.
They're too primitive, too much under nature's sway, and consequently
too sensual to have any qualms about worshipping or, rather, fearing and
propitiating a deity who corresponds to their subconscious enslavement. Being predominantly sensual, they project
their sensuality on to their deity, and accordingly endeavour to appease him in
an appropriately sensual manner, usually through blood sacrifices though also,
as in the case of the ancient Greeks - a slightly less fearful and generally
more egocentric people on the whole - through sexual orgies ..."
A titter of laughter erupted from the
direction of the couch to Matthew's right, though Mrs Evans, less amused than
her daughter, merely smiled her tacit acknowledgement of ancient Greek
religiosity or, at any rate, to such of it as their guest had alluded.
"Well, if these pre-Christian or pagan
peoples are more under the sway of the subconscious than of the superconscious," Matthew continued, ignoring as best he
could Gwen's non-verbal interruption, "then Christians represent an
evolutionary development which signifies a balance between the two parts of the
psyche, between the sensuous illusion-forming part and the spiritual
truth-forming part, and are consequently more dualistic. They aren't a people under the dominion of
nature, but a people, on the contrary, who have evolved, thanks in large
measure to the gradual expansion of their villages into towns, towards a position
midway between nature and civilization.
To them, Heaven is as much a fact of life or religion as Hell. For they're no longer under the dominion of
evil, but balanced between evil and good in what I like to regard as the ego in
its prime, that's to say, the twilight fusion-point of the two main parts of
the psyche. Christianity, you see, is
really a twilight religion between the darkness of Creator-worship and the
light of Holy Ghost experience, between the sensual and the spiritual. Thus it's a religion half-illusion and
half-truth - Jesus Christ, the actual deity of the Christians, having actually
lived and been a man, religious requirement having endowed Him with
supernatural significance, attributed all manner of miracles to Him which,
though valid from a theological viewpoint, appear less than plausible from a
rational one, and accordingly fail to impress us or, at any rate, those of us
who are rational."
"Here, here!" exclaimed Mr Evans,
banging the hand holding his pipe down on the arm of his armchair so violently
... that some of its still-smouldering contents spilled out onto the
carpet. "I've never been able to
accept the divinity of Christ. To me,
the idea of God as man or of man as God seems intrinsically suspect."
"Yes, well that doesn't mean to say
that the idea of God as spirit should also be so," Matthew calmly
responded. "For it's from
Christianity, with its illusion/truth dichotomy, that we progress to the
post-Christian context, largely brought about by the expansion of towns into
cities and our growing independence from the sensuous influence of nature, in
which the balance between the two parts of the psyche no longer holds sway and
we find ourselves becoming progressively biased on the side of the superconscious, on the side of truth, goodness, peace,
spirituality - all those attributes of life, in short, which stand at the
opposite pole to those worshipped by the pre-Christians, or pagans. No longer can God be conceived in terms of a
dualistic compromise between illusion and truth, still less in terms of
illusion alone, but only as truth, as God per se, which
corresponds, in traditional terminology, to the Holy Ghost, the third and
highest part of the so-called Blessed Trinity.
"Here, at last, is the spiritual as
opposed to anthropomorphic awareness of God," Matthew went on, warming to
his thesis, "the religious sense commensurate with ultimate divinity. No longer is it necessary to fear as well as
love God, but simply to experience and understand God as love, light, bliss,
peace, etc. Nor need one conceive of
this God in terms of 'He', as an anthropomorphic projection of the ego, for the
simple reason that one has transcended the balance between the subconscious and
superconscious parts of the psyche, and thus evolved
beyond egocentric projections. No longer
'He' but 'it', no longer Jesus Christ but the Holy Spirit of Universal
Consciousness or whatever else you prefer to term this manifestation of true
divinity, which is one with the superconscious mind.
"Thus religion, becoming at last a
question of truth, evolves to its third and final stage," Matthew
continued, by now considerably fired-up, "beyond which it cannot
change. For once one has arrived at a
true conception of God, one cannot return to an earlier illusory or
part-illusory concept. It's no good,
once one has seen through the nature of prayer - that mental activity founded
on egocentric projection - pretending that one can return to a religious
framework endorsing it in due course.
One can't! A society growing
increasingly under the sway of the superconscious can
only respond to that influence in an appropriately transpersonal way - by
transcending egocentric selfhood. For
God, conceived in any ultimate sense, isn't there to be petitioned or thanked,
praised or cursed, but simply experienced, as the heavenly side of Last
Judgement paintings has generally shown.
Bliss, peace, love - this is compatible with ultimate divinity, not
action! Only an illusory or partly
illusory concept of God leads one to believe that He is a being capable of
exerting Himself on one's behalf, or even against one. And to assume it isn't possible to believe in
God because there's so much evil in the world ... is simply to betray the fact
that one would have a rather simplistic and outmoded concept of God in mind to
equate Him with such evil. For this
higher divinity is certainly not responsible for all the evil in the
world. How can it be when it has nothing
to do with evil, since a state-of-mind, a peace which 'surpasses all
understanding'? No, it's highly unlikely
that bliss can be held responsible for agony.
Only a dualist might think so, a man, in other words, who signifies but
a phase of human evolution, when evil and good seem to be balanced in the world
and it's possible to assume that the one must necessarily be dependent on the
other. Yet just as human evolution is a
journey from the subconscious to the superconscious,
from sensuality to spirituality, illusion to truth, so it's a journey from evil
to good - from Hell to Heaven. It's only
a combination of Hell and Heaven, so to speak, during the Christian twilight
era of human evolution, when the darkness seems to be balanced by the
light."
Thomas Evans wasn't particularly impressed
by this line of argument, since he had suffered a great deal in life from poor
health (he currently had a smoke-fuelled weak heart), financial and business
worries, personal anxieties of one kind or another, etc., and was therefore
unconvinced that life, however one conceived of it, was becoming progressively
more heavenly. To him, it was pretty
evident that dualistic considerations still had to be borne in mind, and he
wasted no time in saying so.
"Oh, I quite agree," said Matthew
by way of a deferential response.
"There is still a large amount of evil in life. For we haven't yet transcended the egocentric
balance to any appreciable extent, and accordingly still have a fair way to go
before we get completely beyond dualism, since the subconscious hasn't been
completely triumphed over at present. It
may take decades or even centuries before we evolve to a context where Heaven
becomes more of a reality than at present.
But there's no way that you or anyone else can disprove the fact that
we're evolving in the right direction for spiritual transformation, and it
seems quite probable that if we persist long enough we'll eventually attain to
our goal - attain, in other words, to what I am wont to call a post-human
millennium, which, as the terms suggests, is more than merely post-humanist,
being properly divine."
"No, I can't believe that for one
moment, any more than I can believe most of what you say!" Mr Evans
obdurately retorted. "I expect
you'll be telling us, before long, that we're destined to turn into angels or
supermen or something equally preposterous at this post-human millennium of
your fanciful imagination."
"Thomas!" interposed Mrs Evans,
somewhat annoyed by her husband's impertinence.
"It isn't necessarily as preposterous as you, in your bourgeois
short-sightedness, would seem to think."
Mr Evans glared ferociously at his wife, as
though she had just committed a sacrilege in his house. What right had she to
interfere, least of all in a way which drew attention to the limitations of his
ideological views? But he didn't say
anything to her. Instead, he turned his
attention back to Matthew Pearce and glared at him awhile. The atmosphere in the room was by no means
pleasant. "And I don't quite
see," he confessed, picking up the thread of his retort again,
"exactly what all this has to do with modern art, which I recall we were
discussing prior to religion. Am I to
take it that such art generally signifies a superconscious
bias, too?"
"Yes, that would be helpful,"
said Matthew. "For I was saying
that Christian art was essentially a matter of dualism, not just religious subjects,
and that post-Christian art couldn't be judged by the same standards, but had
to be viewed in its own context of lopsided spirituality, had to be seen from
the viewpoint of superconsciousness instead of mere egocentricity. For, compared with traditional art, modern
art is largely a transpersonal phenomenon, transpersonal in its abstraction and
transpersonal in what often appears as scrappiness or simplicity - a refusal to
appear figuratively great, profound, overly objective, technically brilliant,
or whatever else may be associated with an art form centred on the ego, which
is to say, the dualistic fusion-point between subconscious and superconscious minds.
Thus when it really is modern, and
accordingly reflects the most advanced creative tendencies of the day, art is
essentially an abstract rather than a representational phenomenon, a product of
the city environment.
"Most of Salvador Dali's art, on the
other hand, isn't truly modern at all," he went on, "because too
egocentric to signify a more transpersonal or transcendental approach to
painting. It's technically closer to
Christian art.... Now when one remembers that Dali was the son of a notary, and
thus hailed from a conservative upper-middle-class background, it needn't
surprise one if much of his work should reflect a representational standpoint
in an age of mounting abstraction. Yet
not all of his art can be so described, especially that part of it which
focuses on Christian mysticism and utilizes a nuclear technique - a particle
technique symptomatic of the nuclear disintegration of matter.
"However that may be, it's still fair
to say that modern art is better characterized by transcendental abstraction
than by surrealistic representation," Matthew continued, "that a
painting intimating of the Holy Ghost is more relevant to and indicative of the
age than one with Christian associations, even if those associations happen to
be radicalized by a nuclear or mystical technique."
"I'm afraid I know very little about
Salvador Dali," remarked Mr Evans complacently. "Though I've seen one or two of his
canvases, which were quite intriguing if somewhat perversely obscure. Yet at least they could be recognized as
works of art, even if not as convincingly so as those of old masters like Raphael,
Rembrandt, and Rubens."
If anything was guaranteed to make Matthew
lose patience with the man, it was this kind of attitude. For it was evident that Mr Evans couldn't
think of art in other than traditionally objective terms, and therefore automatically
referred the present back to the past, regarding modern works as art only if
they could be compared, to some extent, with those of the old masters, and
considering all the rest, that is to say the bulk of twentieth-century art, as
anti-art or even as no art at all. A
typically philistine viewpoint, but scarcely one to be wondered at, in the
circumstances! After all, Thomas Evans
was the manager of an insurance company in Northampton and, as such, one
couldn't very well expect him to be particularly aware of what was happening in
the world of modern art, or why it had to happen. In a sense, it didn't matter what he thought,
his views were of scant consequence, since those of a businessman, not an
artist.
It was therefore important for Matthew to
keep this in mind and thus make a determined effort not to be impressed by the
reactionary opposition Mr Evans chose to offer, on the contentious subject of
modern art. No, instead of losing
patience with him on account of his virtually inevitable unenlightened
viewpoint, Matthew resolved to keep Mr Evans in perspective as a perfectly
ordinary middle-class citizen whom it was unwise to expect to behave or talk
like an artist, least of all a radical one.
If his viewpoint was somewhat limited, then so be it! There could be no real reason, given his
critical temperament and occupational habits, why it should be otherwise.
Yet to some extent it was nonetheless
necessary for the artist to continue his defence and explication of modern art,
if only because his own reputation and self-respect were personally at stake,
and this he proceeded to do, albeit without any conviction that what he had to
say would be appreciated.
The fact that art had once primarily served
the emotions was perfectly true. Just as
it had also served, albeit at a later and more evolved epoch, both the will and
intellect combined, and was now primarily serving the spirit. It had passed, like religion, from the realm
of illusion to the realm of truth, and would continue to evolve in accordance
with the contemporary imbalance on the side of truth. To claim, therefore, that art should only
serve illusion would be as ridiculous, in Matthew's view, as to claim that
religion was only a matter of illusion and would cease to exist as religion if
it wasn't. No, art hadn't ceased to
exist simply because the old criterion of dualistic balance had been
superseded. On the contrary, what now
existed was simply a different kind of art - more truthful and rational than
hitherto. If, from a traditional
viewpoint, it appeared to be a lesser art than that relative to an egocentric
age, it nonetheless existed on a higher level of evolution and had to be
respected on its own terms. This much,
at any rate, the artist endeavoured to assure his sceptical host.
"Yes, but I still don't see the
artistic significance of either a monochromatic or nearly blank canvas,"
Mr Evans objected, unwilling to accept Matthew's attempted vindication at
face-value. "You call it
minimalism, or some such term, and regard the result as an advanced or extreme
form of abstraction. But, really, it
doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, is
that the ultimate truth in modern art?"
Matthew had to smile, in spite of his
seriousness. "I don't know whether
it's the ultimate truth," he replied, "but it can certainly be
equated with spirit, light, and thus the truth of the superconscious
mind. Indeed, I incline to view
abstraction as a mode of religious art, the religious art of transcendental
man. It signifies the victory of the
spiritual over the material, the transpersonal over the impersonal,
subjectivity over objectivity. A thing
which also applies, I believe, to most light art, especially where neon tubing
is involved. And, of course, to a large
quantity of modern sculpture, or sculpture emphasizing light and space as
opposed to the secular, to whatever reflects materialism, technology,
urbanization, scientific progress, and so on, in the world at large. It's the difference, if you like, between
that which emphasizes the influence of the Holy Ghost and that, by contrast,
which emphasizes the influence of contemporary science and industry. Both kinds of art, now as previously, are
equally justified, but they aren't on the same level. The religious, now as before, signifies a
superior tendency, one dealing with the more-than-human, dealing, in short,
with the principal concern of human evolution - namely, the attainment to
salvation in the millennial Beyond, the transformation of man into the
superhuman being which lies transpersonally beyond
him."
"Bah! I cannot accept that
interpretation of human evolution," Mr Evans confessed, glowering
defiantly.
"No?
Well, maybe that's because you're essentially a materialist and
therefore have no use for spiritual salvation," Matthew retorted. "Yet, to me, a person who is indisposed
to reconcile himself to the notion that science and technology are ends in
themselves, it seems indisputably evident that evolution must be conceived
primarily in terms of man's changing relationships to divinity and only
secondarily in terms of how he sustains himself during the course of those
changes. To see technological and
industrial progress as ends in themselves would seem to me a kind of insanity. Yet neither would it be entirely sane if one
were to dismiss the secular and materialistic side of evolution altogether, as
though it were of small account. For
it's only through our ever-changing environments that we come to attain to a
better and more truthful relationship with divinity. Only with the aid of our materialistic
progress in respect of new technologies."
"So that is presumably why you
sometimes work in a genre or format in which complex geometrical shapes,
suggestive of the influence of contemporary technology, play an important role,
is it?" Mr Evans deduced, recalling to mind an earlier facet of their
conversation.
Matthew nodded affirmatively. "Yes, though not very often, least of
all these days," he admitted.
"For I like to think of myself as a predominantly religious painter,
in the service of the Holy Ghost. In
point of fact, I abandoned the impersonality of geometrical concerns some time
ago for a kind of transcendental, symbolic art which sometimes makes use of a
dove and at other times of an intensely luminous globe of light-suggesting
paint."
"How d'you
mean?" asked Mr Evans, looking slightly puzzled, as well he might.
"Well, as you doubtless know, the dove
is symbolic of the Holy Ghost, so I use it to signify our age's growing
allegiance, via the superconscious mind, to
transcendentalism, and thus to the spirit.
Painted in white on a silver background, or occasionally on a pale-blue
one, the dove becomes for me a symbol of contemporary religion, equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin's Omega
Point. Now as the Omega Point is also a
symbol, a concept for Ultimate Godhead in pure spirit, I make use of that as
well, and so paint canvases in which an intensely pure light, turned-in upon
itself in blissful self-contemplation, exists at the centre of a silver ground. But more recently, within the past couple of
months, I've begun to paint, in very minimalist outlines reminiscent of
Matisse's graphics and Caulfield's still-lives, figures meditating, seated
cross-legged in upright postures on a flat plane with a kind of seraphic glow
about them."
"Oh, really?" Mr Evans responded
in a mockingly indifferent tone-of-voice.
He had never meditated in his life, nor did he know anyone who had. "And are they supposed to represent the
Buddha, or what?" he almost sarcastically inquired.
"No, nothing of the kind,"
Matthew maintained, ignoring, as best he could, the air of flippancy attending
his host's sarcastic curiosity.
"The figures used in the compositions in question are perfectly
Western, designed to reflect the mounting relevance of meditation to a
post-Christian society. They're not so
much emissaries of Eastern religion or traitors to their cultural heritage ...
as intelligent Westerners for whom the 'Third Person' of the Trinity has come
to have more significance than the 'Second'.
They pertain to spirituality in a modern industrialized and urbanized
society, to a spirituality which reflects our severance from nature and
consequent post-dualistic bias. To them,
sin and fear of God are alike irrelevant.
For they are too ascetic to be unduly exposed to sin, and can only
conceive of God in terms of grace.
They're not Buddhists but transcendentalists. And when they meditate, it's effectively with
a view to fulfilling Christian prophecy and bringing the Christian aspiration
towards salvation closer to fruition. In
other words, to entering the 'Kingdom of Heaven' wherein only peace, bliss,
love, and light reign. Being
post-dualistic, they have no use for Hell."
Thomas Evans inflicted a short, sharp snort
on the artist in supercilious response.
"I wish I could say the same," he caustically declared. "But, as it happens, I have to live in
this world, which, to the best of my knowledge, is decidedly dualistic. Your meditating figures seem far too
complacent for me, too much a figment of your self-serving imagination. They suggest a greater degree of optimism
concerning this life than ever I would wish to entertain. They seem to me to have turned their backs on
reality and to be living in a kind of dream world."
"I'm afraid I can't agree with
you," said Matthew.
"No, I don't suppose you can," Mr
Evans retorted sarcastically, after which, to Matthew's relief, he relapsed
into a silence disturbed only by the lighting and puffing of his pipe.
CHAPTER THREE
Following
dinner early that evening, Gwen and Matthew went out into the large back garden
to get some air and soak up a little of the sun which was now bathing it in a
pool of soft light. They took a couple
of deck chairs and found a pleasant spot over by an imposing cluster of
rhododendrons, which stood to the right of the garden at a distance of some
thirty yards from the house. It was
really Gwen's decision to sit there, for she hated to sit in the centre of the
garden, where there was a total absence of plant life and one felt exposed to
prying eyes all around one. Only by its
edges, where the flowers and bushes were reposing in loosely arranged beds, did
she feel any degree of complacency, born of the privacy they appeared to provide. Besides, she liked the scent of the plants,
which was particularly pleasant where they were now sitting. The centre of the garden, about which only
pale grass grew, seemed to her relatively barren and devoid of life.
"I trust you didn't find dad too
trying during dinner?" she gently inquired of Matthew, after a few
minutes' respectful silence had fallen between them in the refreshing presence
of temperate nature.
"No, not really," he replied,
more out of a mechanical response to her probing statement than an honest
answer. He looked at her
half-humorously, as though in ironic deference to the fact that Mr Evans had
been more upsetting before dinner than during it. Indeed, it might have been truer to imply
that Mr Evans was pretty upsetting whether or not he was talking. But he had no real desire to compromise her
over the thorny issue of her father, limiting himself, instead, to a
good-natured dismissal of the matter, as though it were of small account. For anything more serious would probably have
led him to get up and make his way back to the station there and then, in order
to be free not only of Gwen's father but of Gwen herself, who wasn't exactly
the most kindred of spirits, either. Yet
he didn't want to make a scene of it, to treat this experience too
seriously. Better, on second thoughts,
to treat it with a kind of scientific detachment, as though one had been
entrusted with the responsibility of studying, at relatively close-quarters, a
species of life which, though personally abhorrent to one, it was nevertheless
necessary to treat with a modicum of respect, if only to complete one's
studies. It might, after all, lead to
some as-yet unimagined revelation. At
least it had already led to a better understanding of Gwen, which was
something.
"I really ought to have warned you, in
advance, of what my father was like," she remarked sympathetically. "But I wasn't altogether sure of how he
would react to you. Besides, I was
afraid that you might not have agreed to come here, had I given you prior
warning about him."
Matthew smiled dismissively. "Oh, don't worry yourself about
it," he advised her. "I didn't
exactly expect him to be an exact replica of myself. He's entitled to his views, after all, even
if I can't share them."
There ensued a further short period of silence,
before Gwen asked: "What d'you think of my
mother?"
It was a question Matthew had
half-expected, but he still blushed slightly as he replied: "She seems
quite pleasant really, quite polite and friendly; though I haven't yet had a
chance to form a clear impression of her.
Like you, she tends to keep quiet when Mr Evans is speaking."
"Yes, that's true enough," Gwen
admitted. "She's not a particularly
talkative person anyway, even given the fact that dad doesn't exactly encourage
conversation. He mostly keeps to himself
in the house."
"Don't your parents get on very well
together?" Matthew asked, partly in response to this remark and partly
from a vague premonition to the contrary.
"No, not for the past five or six
years," Gwen revealed, blushing slightly.
"Largely in consequence of dad's poor health - his fits of
depression and bad heart, his liver and bronchial trouble - which seems to have
come between them and isolated them from each other to a certain extent. Not that mum's health is entirely good. But she does at least fare better than him,
as a rule."
"She certainly looks well,"
Matthew candidly opined. "And
young, too. Indeed, I was more than a
little surprised to learn that the woman who answered the door to us was in
fact your mother. She seemed more like
an elder sister."
Gwen smiled faintly and then said:
"Yes, she's only seventeen years older than me actually. But that, too, is one of the reasons why my
parents don't get on as well as they formerly did. For dad is ten years her senior and tends to
behave as if he were a member of an older generation ... which, when you
consider the nature of his health, effectively appears to be the case. It's as though he has already crossed the
threshold into old age, while she has hardly entered middle age."
Matthew couldn't argue with that
observation! "And you're their only
child?" he conjectured.
"Yes, though mum lost two children
prematurely, and I had a brother who died of pneumonia at six," Gwen
answered on a note of sadness. "He was
two years younger than me."
"I'm sorry to hear it," said
Matthew, respectfully deferring to convention.
"It must have been rather upsetting for you."
"Yes, for a while," Gwen
admitted. "But more so for mum, who
was very fond of him. She had always
wanted a boy." There was a tinge of
self-pity in her voice, as though indicative of the fact that, as a girl, she
had rated lower in her mother's estimation and grown to resent it. But she didn't say anything else about the
subject, and Matthew tactfully refrained from further inquiry.
Indeed, he was secretly gratified when,
instead of continuing the conversation along other lines, his girlfriend
relapsed into one of her characteristic silences, abandoning her face to the
sunlight, which caused it to take on an almost angelic aura of transcendent
spirituality, like Rossetti's Beatrice. To be sure, there was certainly something
Pre-Raphaelite about her at this moment, something ethereal and
not-quite-there. Yet such an illusion
was quickly dispelled from Matthew's mind as she turned her face to one side
and caught some shadow from the nearby rhododendrons. Now she was simply Gwendolyn Evans again,
devoid of spiritual nobility, the daughter of a provincial bourgeois. Her attractiveness, suddenly released from
transcendent pretensions, assumed more earthly proportions. But for her delicacy of build, one might have
taken her for an average sensualist.
Instead of which, one had no option but to acknowledge her for the
dualistic compromise she was - both sensual and spiritual in approximately
equal degrees.
Turning his gaze away from her impassive
face, Matthew focused his attention on the detached house in front of them, the
rear windows of which glinted in the soft sunlight. Its perfectly conventional middle-class
respectability suddenly became a source of annoyance to him as he recalled, not
without a pang of regret, that he had allowed himself to be drawn into a
context for which he had no real sympathy and absolutely no desire to emulate
in his own life - namely, the context of bourgeois compromise. For the fairly large house that his vision
now embraced stood as a symbol to him of most of the things he was in rebellion
against and preferred not to see. It
stood, above all, as a symbol of the class which had come to power after the
aristocracy and now prospered on the sweat of the proletariat. Yet it also stood as a symbol, in large
measure, of the class which took the middle road between the aristocracy and the
proletariat, and signified a kind of midway stage of human evolution. Not as materialistic as the former nor as
spiritualistic as the latter, the bourgeoisie were resigned to a compromise
formula which, while leaving them cognizant of the fact that excessive wealth
was a grave obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, precluded them from
relinquishing the benefits of materialism to any appreciable extent, least of
all to an extent which made them candidates for spiritual enlightenment
personally!
Quite the contrary, the bourgeois was very
firmly, now as before, a creature of the middle road, the dualistic
material/spiritual compromise which found its religious home in Christianity
and its political home in parliamentary democracy. If his house wasn't as grand as an
aristocrat's, well and good! He had no
great difficulty living with that fact.
But to suggest to him that he should go one stage further up the ladder
of human evolution and relinquish private property altogether, resigning
himself to life in a comparatively small council house or flat, would be
tantamount to depriving him of his very existence, and such a suggestion would
meet with very little approval! Indeed,
it would probably meet with none! For
the bourgeois was not an animal which could turn itself into a proletarian, any
more than an aristocrat was an animal which could turn itself into a
bourgeois. If a bourgeois was
spiritually superior to an aristocrat, he was yet spiritually inferior to a
proletarian, and could never alter himself one way or the other. By his very compromise nature, he was
condemned to the twilight stage of human evolution in between the darkness and
the light - a perfectly legitimate position while the twilight was inevitable,
but an increasingly questionable, not to say untenable, one the more the twilight
changed to light and society accordingly progressed away from its former
dualistic compromise towards a stage of life that transcended dualism, a stage
in which only proletarian criteria were relevant. As a creature who signified a kind of
dovetailed combination of aristocratic and proletarian elements within himself,
the bourgeois could never emerge from the moral twilight. If it came to an end under the sway of an
increasingly strong barrage of light, the bourgeois would perish too. He wasn't capable of living solely in the
light, for it would be a refutation of his other half, an abnegation of his
dualism. No, he could only flourish and
perpetuate himself while the twilight prevailed. Once it had gone - whoosh, no more bourgeois!
Whatever pertained to the light was
proletarian; was man become wary of materialism and living in smaller houses,
smaller apartments, or flats because he was too evolved to require large-scale
property, because, in other words, his superconscious
predominated over his subconscious rather than existed in a balanced compromise
with it; was man born and bred in the city, away from the sensuous influence of
nature; was transcendental man. Yes, but
not the bourgeois, not Christian man.
There could be no question of his transformation. This house, sparkling in the sunlight, was
destined to be superseded world-wide - and in a sense already had been - by a
less materialistic scale-of-values.
In the overall progression of evolution
through approximately three stages ... from a dominating materialistic class to
a liberated spiritualistic class via a worldly compromise class, this house
undoubtedly signified something morally better, higher, and more humane than
the typical aristocratic dwellings which had preceded it. It was certainly less glaringly materialistic
than the huge castles, palaces, and country houses favoured by the
nobility. It was not the repository of
so many possessions, and such possessions as it housed were generally of a
less-ornate and expensive variety than those favoured by the overtly
materialistic class. They were unlikely
to distract the eye from spiritual preoccupations to anything like the same
extent as those possessions which had been specifically designed to glorify
matter. The library, for instance, would
not be nearly so large or contain as many weighty and expensively-tooled,
leather-backed books. On the contrary,
it would be of moderate proportions, containing, at most, a few thousand books,
and most if not all of those less-expensive hardbacks would have been read, not
simply owned for the mere sake of collecting or signifying the extent of one's
wealth and/or materialistic power.
Indeed, there may even be, among the ranks
of such bourgeois tomes, a few paperbacks, as befitting an age in which the
spiritual predominates over the material and a book is accordingly judged more
by what it contains by way of intellectual or cultural nourishment than with
what care or materials it was made. Yet
it was highly unlikely that such a library would house any great number of
paperbacks. For the bourgeois would not
want to deprive himself of hardbacks to an extent which made his collection
lack a certain amount of materialistic elegance. Oh, no!
If he instinctively looks down on the extensive materialism of an
aristocrat's library, he yet shies away from the prospect of relinquishing his
taste for hardbacks to the extent required by a proletarian library, in which,
one may surmise, only paperbacks would exist.
Furthermore, he would not wish to reduce the number of books in his
collection, either. For the few thousand
he owns seems to him more becoming than the mere 500-odd books to be found in
the average proletarian collection.
After all, his house is somewhat larger than the average proletarian
dwelling, and therefore it's likely that his library will have to be
correspondingly larger, if it isn't to look ridiculously out-of-scale with its
surroundings. As the man of the middle
road, he knows exactly where he stands.
His library, like just about everything else about him, is somewhere
in-between the alternative extremes. It
corresponds to stage two of human evolution.
Yes, and although Thomas Evans wasn't the
most scholarly or bookish of middle-class people, it could certainly be said of
his library - which Matthew had taken a glance at prior to dinner -
that it represented the requisite compromise of scale and favoured books
in-between the extensive materialism of the previous historical class and the
intensive spirituality of the ultimate one.
Nothing extreme would be found there!
A gentle sigh beside him caused the artist
to abandon his philosophical reflections and turn his attention back towards
Gwen who, with eyes closed, seemed perfectly resigned to the absence of
conversation and only too happy for a chance to vegetate in the warm evening
air, feeling the caress of the sun upon her upturned face, which had assumed a
mellow glow. Watching her thus,
seemingly oblivious of his presence beside her, Matthew experienced a moment of
tenderness towards her and gently but firmly placed a hand on her nearest leg,
just above the knee and below the rim of her pale-cream skirt, which she had
drawn-up slightly in response to the sun.
This presence of his hand on her flesh caused her to smile in a subtly
sensual way, yet she kept her eyes closed.
She looked perfectly complacent, like a softly purring cat - submerged
in soft sensuality. At any other time
Matthew would probably have raised the rim of her skirt until her thighs were
completely naked and her panties exposed to view, content to focus his
attention upon that part of them behind which her crotch would be gently
stewing in its own sexual gravy, leading a kind of vegetable existence of its
own - soft and languid. But in the back
garden of her parents' house, what with the prospect of someone spying on them
through one or another of the rear windows, he had to resign himself to gently
patting her nearest leg instead, not exposing the outer reaches of her more
private parts to his tender gaze.
And this he continued to do even after his
thoughts had once more turned away from Gwen's body and become entangled in
intellectual matters again, this time concerning the architectural innovations
of Gottfried Semper, the nineteenth-century German
architect who occasionally designed buildings with a view to reflecting
different stages of architectural evolution - the façade beginning on the
ground floor with a coarse appearance and ascending, through successive floors,
to a smoother one, with a corresponding change of materials in the overall
construction. At present, Matthew
couldn't remember very much about the man from what he had read, some years
before, in the local public library; though he knew that, if he were an
architect bent on illustrating evolutionary transformations from one floor to
another, he would adopt a somewhat different approach from Semper
- one emphasizing the growing predilection for the light which characterized
our evolutionary struggle.
Thus, taking the façade as its most representative
component, his projected building would have a row of small windows on the
ground floor spaced at regular, if quite distant, intervals, so that the
overall impression was one of darkness or, rather, of the ego - that
fusion-point of the subconscious and superconscious
minds - under subconscious dominion. The
subconscious would be represented by the concrete, the superconscious
by the windows, and the ratio of the one to the other would be approximately in
the region of 3:1. Thus the ego of pre-dualistic
man would be represented as a predominantly dark phenomenon. Aristocratic materialism would have the
advantage.
With the first floor, however, indicative
of stage two of human evolution, the ratio of concrete to windows would be
transformed into a dualistic balance, so that the increase in window space came
to signify a greater degree of superconscious
influence, commensurate with bourgeois consciousness, and the overall
impression was accordingly of an ego balanced, in twilight compromise, between
the dark and the light. In this section
of the façade, the percentage which the material aspect had lost would have
been gained by the spiritual one. Heaven
and Hell would be kept in dualistic equilibrium.
Not so, however, with the second and final
floor, representative of the third stage of human evolution, in which the ratio
of concrete to windows or, rather, of windows to concrete had become the
converse of that exhibited on the ground floor, and the light of the superconscious accordingly prevailed over the darkness of
the subconscious in the ratio of 3:1, reducing the material part of this upper
section of the façade to but a quarter of the total space. Here, then, it would be the turn of
proletarian man to advertise his predilection for the light, his ego being
decidedly under the sway of the superconscious and
thus partial to a spiritual bias. Here,
on the second floor, human evolution attained to its climax. And after that - well, it only remained for
proletarian man to transcend his humanity altogether, namely by dispensing with
the remaining influence of the subconscious, for him to enter the post-human
millennium and thus become divine. In
the meantime, however, a lot of work to be done, not least of all in using more
window space than hitherto, which is to say, than the bourgeoisie could
countenance!
Such, at any rate, was the plan Matthew
thought he would put into architectural operation, were he an architect bent on
expanding and refining upon the techniques first propounded by Gottfried Semper. Indeed, he
might even do a variation on that, in which the façade of his evolutionary
building, while retaining the respective ratios of concrete to windows on each
floor, was less part of one house than indicative of three different buildings
built one atop the other - the one on the ground floor, so to speak, three
times as large as its top-floor counterpart, while the one in the middle,
suggestive of bourgeois compromise, signified a sort of cross between the other
two.... Or, alternatively, to conceive of such a wedding-cake building as one
house in which three separate apartments, viz. an aristocratic, a bourgeois,
and a proletarian, were arranged in vertical juxtaposition, the overall
pyramidal shape of the building indicative of the diminishing scale of
materialism as one approached the top floor.
Thus one could speak of an aristocratic floor, a bourgeois floor, and a
proletarian floor, each of which reflected the aforementioned evolutionary
transformations in the psyche. It would
be an evolutionary building more comprehensive and profoundly significant than
anything of which Semper had ever dreamed!
The sight of Mrs Evans emerging from the
house suddenly put a stop to further musings on Matthew's part, bringing him
sharply back to the provincial surroundings in which he somewhat ironically
found himself. She was crossing the lawn
in their direction, heading, it appeared, for Gwen.
"It looks as though your mother has
something to tell you," Matthew softly remarked, for the benefit of the
tranquil figure beside him.
"Oh?" She opened her eyes and cast the approaching
figure an inquisitive glance. She didn't
appear too disconcerted by this interruption.
"Your friend Linda's on the
phone," Mrs Evans informed her, as soon as she came within speaking
distance.
"Oh, really?" Gwen responded in a
genuinely surprised tone-of-voice.
"I hadn't expected her to phone today." She got up from her deck-chair and turned
towards Matthew, who was on the point of getting up himself. "You needn't disturb yourself,
Matt," she reassured him. "I
won't be long."
"No, and if Mr Pearce doesn't object,
I'll keep him company in your absence, Gwendolyn," said Mrs Evans,
simultaneously sitting herself down in the space just vacated by her
daughter. "We mustn't allow him to
feel neglected, must we?" She
smiled at Gwen, who impulsively reciprocated, before setting off at a fairly
brisk pace for the waiting call.
Strange things can happen, for all of a
sudden Matthew found himself transformed from a rather bored and meditative
dreamer into an alert and sensitive companion of Mrs Evans. It was as though, with the change of woman
beside him, a new lease-of-life had suddenly been instilled into his veins,
making him conscious of himself as a man for virtually the first time that
evening.
"Just the perfect weather for being
out here, isn't it?" Mrs Evans observed, as she turned her dark-green eyes
on the artist.
"Most assuredly," he agreed,
nodding profusely. He might almost have
blushed with shame for the (what seemed to him) too conspicuous response to her
sensual presence beside him, the too-lingering consciousness of her beauty,
tempered, as it was, by a whiff of patchouli perfume which mingled almost
surrealistically with the natural scents of some nearby shrubs. A little extra daring on his part and he
would have cast a glance over her pale-blue skirt to the dark nylon-stockinged knees, as though to obtain a better idea of her
beauty and achieve a more comprehensive assessment. But such daring, he felt, would expose his
consciousness of her as a sensual being to an extent which could only have
compromised him further, and he lacked the courage or audacity to indulge it. Besides, she might have taken offence, considered
him ill-mannered, and embarrassed him as never before. No, it was not for him to play the gallant
where Gwen's mother was concerned, even if she did possess an uncommon degree
of feminine beauty.
"I must say, I was quite intrigued by
some of the things you were saying to my husband before dinner," Mrs Evans
revealed. "Especially by the types
of transcendental motifs you're currently painting. It sounds rather fun."
Matthew felt agreeably flattered. "Yes, it's certainly a new direction in
my art, as in my sculpture too," he averred.
"You're also a sculptor?"
"Well yes, at least to some
extent. I mean, I'm first and foremost a
painter and only secondarily a sculptor, so to speak. But I enjoy the one as much as the
other." Which wasn't quite true,
though he could hardly elaborate on his reasons for preferring painting to
sculpture at the moment.
"What sort of things do you
sculpt?" Mrs Evans wanted to know.
"Well, quite a number of things
actually. Doves, for instance. Symbols, one might say, of the post-Christian
religious impulse."
"Not copulating doves, by any
chance?"
"Er,
no. Not like the ones favoured by Jacob
Epstein, and not particularly like Barbara Hepworth's,
either. Exclusively single doves with
outstretched wings, like they were gliding through the air. Spiritual doves rather than simply sensual
ones."
"And how big are they?" Mrs Evans
asked.
"Oh, about life-size, which is to say,
quite small," Matthew informed her matter-of-factly. "But I occasionally vary the scale, sometimes
making them as large as a football, sometimes reducing them to approximately
the size of a cricket ball. The smallest
ones are the hardest to do, but they provide me with a fresh challenge, which
is basically why I do them."
Mrs Evans smiled admiringly. "And what else do you do?" she
pressed him.
"Oh, figures meditating, seated
cross-legged on a small pedestal or cushion, as in my paintings," he
revealed, blushing slightly. "There
are only a few of those at present, but they signify a development which I
intend to expand on over the course of time, provided they meet with public
approval. Otherwise I shall be stuck
with an unmarketable product. However,
all this is a comparatively recent development, not at all typical of my
sculpture in general, which, in any case, tends to be less representational, as
befitting the age."
"You mean, it's abstract?" Mrs
Evans conjectured.
"Essentially biomorphic, like the
sculptures of Henry Moore and Jean Arp, two of my
principal influences," Matthew declared, smiling. "Like Arp, I
generally tend to work to a small scale, using marble or lignum vitae. Yet, unlike him, I don't quite possess the
talent for naming works with such poetic skill or imagination! His titles are really quite surreal, you
know, usually having no apparent bearing on the nature of the work itself,
which, in any case, is pretty nondescript.
Besides, he's such a great sculptor - as, of course, is Henry Moore, who
is really the sculptor of our time."
"Really?" responded Mrs Evans
excitedly. "I'm afraid I know very
little about either of them, though I've seen photographic reproductions of one
or two of Moore's works, which, however, I could make neither head nor tail of. I mean, why so abstract?"
"Simply because it's relevant to the
age," Matthew replied at once.
"We've gone beyond the merely representational, the truth-to-nature
school, as one might term the more traditional sculptors. Admittedly, there are exceptions - sculptors,
for instance, like Jacob Epstein and David Wynne, who are generally more
traditional in their approach to sculpture, more given to representations of
one sort or another. But sculptors like
Moore and Arp are, on the whole, more representative
of the times. Indeed, even they are
being surpassed now, since they pertain to a generation whose approach to
sculpture was less transcendent than the leading sculptors of my generation,
like Phillip King and Bruce Beasley, who, naturally enough, have taken
sculpture one stage further in its evolution."
"In what way?" Mrs Evans queried.
"Well, it's not easy to say in a few
words," Matthew confessed, frowning gently, for the reverse of a critic
like Mr Evans was not particularly easy to accommodate either, "but,
fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that they've dispensed with such
natural materials as marble, stone, and wood, and constructed lightweight
sculpture out of synthetic materials, like plastic, fibreglass, plexiglas, and acrylic, which tend to make their works
transcendentally superior to those of their predecessors. Superior on account of the fact that they're
made from synthetic materials and also because they're less heavy, less solid -
altogether more lightweight in appearance.
They often have an effect of expanding space and dissolving or disintegrating
matter, making careful use of light and transparency, perspective and
positioning. For instance, Dan Flavin has constructed sculpture from fluorescent tubes,
which aptly illustrates what I mean by the more transcendental nature of
contemporary sculpture. At times it
tends to merge with Kinetic Art, and it can be difficult to tell them apart -
Kinetics sometimes making use of light, as in the work of Takis."
"I'm afraid you're going way above my
head," Mrs Evans protested, offering him a revealingly bewildered facial
expression. "I've never even heard
of such sculpture, never mind seen it!
Yet what especially puzzles me is why the transcendental? Why the use of synthetic materials?"
Matthew had to smile slightly. It was always the same with average
people. Why this, why that, why not
something else? And, just as often, why
not something better? In Mrs Evans' case
it was evident that her ignorance was partly a consequence of her husband's
hostility to such things, since an investigation of modern art and sculpture
wouldn't have been encouraged or tolerated by the philistine in question. And, of course, some of his prejudices had
rubbed off onto her in any case, making her almost as suspicious as him of contemporary
trends. She was, after all, a bourgeois,
even if a very attractive and relatively pleasant one. Yet the question she had raised was begging
for an answer.
"Well, it just so happens that, being
a comparatively recent development, synthetic materials haven't been used in
this context before," Matthew obligingly informed her. "Now as the genuine artist is always
ready to avail himself of new procedures, indeed is virtually compelled to, it
follows that the use of synthetics appeals to him. However, one could also claim that the tendency
towards enhanced artificiality is a consequence of modern man's environmental
severance from nature, and is accordingly justified on that account. We live at such a remove from the country -
and consequently from its influence - in our great cities, that it becomes
increasingly difficult for us to relate to natural patterns and correspondingly
unattractive. Hence the rise of
non-representational art this century, with the use of synthetic rather than
natural materials. We wish to achieve a
victory over nature, and the more our cities evolve and the more civilized we
become, the greater, by a corresponding degree, is the magnitude of that
victory. You see, the city itself is
essentially a victory over nature, a something apart from and in opposition to
it, and everyone who lives in the city partakes of and, sooner or later,
relates to that victory. At one time, in
the far-off days of our earliest civilizations, we were dominated by nature,
under the sway of sensuous phenomena to an extent which made us very little
different from the beasts. But,
fortunately, we continued to pit ourselves against it, to assert the uniquely
human world over the impersonal and often hostile natural one, and gradually we
got the better of it, evolved to where we are today - participators in an
advanced civilization, anti-natural and/or transcendental men. Needless to say, most of this has come about
within the past 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution and the consequent
expansion of our towns and cities to their current gigantic scales."
"I think it's all evil," Mrs
Evans opined, a gentle though earnest frown of disapproval on her brow. "All this severance from nature which
urban life seems to signify, it isn't good."
"That's where I believe you're
wrong," Matthew retorted, if in a relatively gentle way. "It isn't as bad as might at first
appear." Yet he was conscious,
once more, that he was speaking to a female bourgeois, a bourgeoise,
not to a proletarian, and that his words were consequently wasted on her. For the bourgeoisie, he had little need to
remind himself, were ever a compromise between nature and civilization, the
sensual and the spiritual, and accordingly they had little taste for the big
city, which, in both its extensive and intensive artificiality, constituted a
threat to their integrity - indeed, a refutation of their very existence. The bourgeoisie could only tolerate life in
the big city provided they had a country or suburban house to return
home to in the evenings, after their office work was over and done with for
another day. They were constitutionally
able to manage this kind of compromise, and the bigger the city professional
commitments obliged them to frequent, the more they preferred a correspondingly
extreme rural retreat. Oscillating
between essentially proletarian and aristocratic environments, they retained
their class integrity and were relatively content.
Yet they would have been still more content
if, as in Thomas Evans' case, business could have been conducted in a medium-sized
town and it wasn't therefore necessary to oscillate between radical extremes -
his house being situated in a pleasantly residential section of town and
affording him a welcome relief from its busy main streets. For the bourgeois was traditionally a man of
the town rather than the city, and although he could cope with the latter in
small doses, i.e. for the duration of his working day, he felt much more
at-home between the closer-to-nature walls of the town than in the large-scale
artificial environments of the city.
Having both nature and civilization within easy reach was, after all,
more reassuring for a dualistic mentality than being isolated or threatened
with isolation in one or the other. To a
bourgeois, extremes were equally fatal.
Not to be countenanced! And, as
Matthew Pearce had been reminded, Mrs Evans couldn't possibly countenance
them. She saw advanced civilization as
evil - like D.H. Lawrence, who, in this respect, was fundamentally a bourgeois,
despite his partly proletarian origins.
And there was nothing that Matthew could do or say to convince her
otherwise. No use telling her that the
artificial environment was a passport to the post-human millennium, to the
ultimate victory of the spirit. The
post-human millennium wasn't something to which a bourgeois could relate. In the journey of man from the beastly to the
godly, the bourgeois could go no further than two-thirds of the way up the
ladder of human evolution, having a life-span, so to speak, that lasted
throughout the time when the ego was in its twilight prime. Beyond that, he would cease to be a bourgeois
- indeed, cease to live. No wonder the
prospect of a post-human millennium met with no sympathy or encouragement on
his part! It was a refutation of him!
"And do you also sculpt in or with the
aid of synthetic materials?" Mrs Evans tentatively inquired of Matthew, as
though the possibility that he did so was a kind of evil to be held against
him.
"Naturally," the 'sculptor'
replied, somewhat paradoxically.
"After all, I'm a member of the younger generation of artists, and
so I should be contemporary. There isn't
much point in trying to emulate Moore or Arp now, if
you see what I mean. As an artist, one
should be a sort of spiritual antenna of the race, no matter in what medium one
happens to work. For if you write or
paint or sculpt or compose in a style that's outmoded, you're either a
reactionary or a dilettante, and therefore not strictly necessary. In fact, you're more than likely to be a
curse, assuming, of course, that you're given an opportunity to advertise
yourself. So you've got to be up-to-date
if you hope to achieve anything worthwhile, and one of the best ways - if not
the only way - of assuring that you are up-to-date
is to live in the big city and thus relate to the foremost spiritual thrust of
the age. You can't reflect late
twentieth-century civilization if you spend most of your time in a
village."
"No, I suppose not," Mrs Evans
conceded begrudgingly. "One would
simply relate to the surrounding environment."
"Precisely!" Matthew
confirmed. "So if you're to become
a bona fide artist, you've got to relate to an advanced
environment, it's as simple as that! And
if, having once related to it, you subsequently abandon it for something lower,
like, say, a small town, the chances are that you'll gradually come to relate
more to the spirit of the town and consequently cease being an advanced
artist. You might well end-up an
unenlightened dilettante, consciously or unconsciously praising the shit out of
nature and bourgeois values generally."
It wasn't too difficult for Matthew to see
that Mrs Evans had been slightly wounded by this, though she did her best to
conceal the fact by distancing herself from the latter part of his previous
remark. But, as usual, he couldn't
resist the temptation to be true to himself and speak his mind. If the bourgeoise
in her had been offended, it was just too damn bad! He had no intention of betraying his
allegiance to something higher on account of her! After all, people who did that remained
victims of the status quo and not potential or actual victors over it.
"And do you have these, er, advanced works in your London studio?" she
asked. "I mean, would it be
possible for people to visit you and see them?"
"Yes, at least to see such of them as
I haven't already sold," Matthew answered, somewhat surprised by the
nature of her second question. "Why
do you ask?"
"Simply because I'll be in London next
week to visit a cousin of mine who has recently had a baby, and would be
grateful for an opportunity to see these rather enigmatic works," she
revealed, smiling. "I'm sure I'll
profit from it."
Matthew was indeed surprised. "Well, please take the
opportunity," he responded, a shade nervously under pressure of the regret
that was now pervading his soul, like a dark cloud, for having mentioned the
stuff in the first place. "I'll be
at hand most of next week, so you can come whenever you like."
"Thanks," Mrs Evans responded
with alacrity. "I look forward to
seeing them," she added, principally alluding to his sculptures, though
also unconsciously including his paintings.
There was a pause, before she continued: "It will probably be on
the Wednesday. It's in the Highgate area
of north London that you live and work, isn't it?"
"Yes," confirmed Matthew, who
then verbally supplied her with the address of his studio.
"Right," said Mrs Evans, making a
mental note of it. "I shouldn't
have any trouble finding my way there.
I'll get a taxi up from the West End in the afternoon, after I've been
to see my cousin, Stephanie. But don't
say anything about this to Gwendolyn, else she might get silly ideas into her
young head! If you could arrange not to
see her on Wednesday, assuming that's all right with you, then I should be able
to visit your studio without causing her to feel either jealous or
suspicious."
Mrs Evans' blunt frankness had the effect
of making Matthew blush slightly.
"I don't normally see Gwen during the day in any case, because I
have my work to do," he assured her.
"She stays in her Chelsea flat or goes out visiting friends, only
coming-up to Highgate or meeting me somewhere in the West End during the
evening. Admittedly, she has spent a
day or two in my flat, but the studio is situated in a different building, some
two hundred yards away. So even if she
were to be in Highgate during the day next week, I wouldn't see her until the
evening. As it happens, I believe her
new school term is due to start fairly soon, so she's likely, as a teacher, to
be more preoccupied with preparing herself for that than with traipsing around
after me. She has her own work to do,
after all."
"Yes, I'm sure she has," Mrs
Evans agreed, with what seemed to Matthew like a small sigh of relief. Then, turning her attention in the direction
of the house, she exclaimed: "Ah, here comes Gwendolyn now! My word, that was quite a long phone
conversation, wasn't it?"
"Just under twenty-five minutes,"
the artist estimated, consulting his digital watch.
Gwen arrived back fairly flushed. "Sorry to have deserted you for so long,
Matt," she said in a lightly apologetic tone-of-voice, "but I haven't
heard anything from Linda for a few weeks because she's been unwell, so I felt
it incumbent on me, as her colleague, to chat her up a bit."
"No problem," he assured her,
smiling thinly. "Your mother has
kept me company." Which was, to be
sure, obvious enough.
"Well, I'd better leave the pair of
you to your private devices again, assuming, of course, you want to stay out
here," Mrs Evans remarked, getting up from the deck-chair on her
daughter's return. She looked at both of
them with searching eyes.
"For a little longer, I suppose,"
said Gwen. "Provided you're not
bored with it, Matt."
"No, not particularly," the
latter responded. "While the sun's
still up, we may as well continue to take heathen advantage of its
vitamin-shedding warmth a while longer."
"Yes, I guess so," Gwen
agreed. And with that, she sat down and
closed her eyes upon her mother's retreating form.
CHAPTER FOUR
Linda
Daniels gently replaced the telephone receiver and returned to the company of
her husband, who was sitting in the adjoining room. He was bent over the pages of a political
novel and briefly looked up at the approach of the medium-built, dark-skinned
young woman who happened to be his second wife.
She tentatively smiled through closed lips and sat down opposite him in
her customary armchair. He was anxious
to learn what she had been discussing all this time with Gwen.
"Principally her latest boyfriend,"
she declared, with an ironic chuckle which momentarily exposed her brilliant
white teeth.
"Oh?" Peter Daniels was instantly intrigued. "I didn't realize she had a new
one."
"Well, she still sees Mark Taber on
occasion, but apparently not with any real enthusiasm. And she doesn't seem to be all that keen on
her latest boyfriend either, if what she told me about him is anything to judge
by."
"How did she meet him?" Peter
asked.
"Apparently quite by accident outside
Kenwood House in north London, about four years ago," Linda replied.
"Four years?" Peter looked as astounded as he sounded.
"Yes, but since she was deeply engaged
in an affair at the time, she didn't give him much satisfaction," Linda
declared. "In fact, she was waiting
for her then-current boyfriend to meet her there, later that same
afternoon. But then this guy, Matthew
Pearce, suddenly appeared out-of-the-blue and started chatting her up."
"How curious!" Peter opined,
putting his book to one side and then leaning back in his capacious
armchair. "And didn't she like
him?"
"Well, she liked him enough to give
him her address, and not only that, but her parents' one too," said
Linda. 'As she'd been obliged to spend
the best part of the afternoon by herself, just casually watching people
passing to-and-fro from a bench outside Kenwood House, she wasn't averse to a
little conversation with this fairly handsome stranger, who seemed to have
taken a distinct fancy to her. She even
accompanied him back to his nearby bedsitter, where
she gave him the aforementioned addresses and I don't know what else
besides. But she got away from him in
good time anyway, evidently by telling him that she had a rendezvous with some
friends, which was partly the case. And
so nothing more was heard of this Matthew guy until he wrote to her parents'
address last month and invited her to meet him, which, curiously enough, she
decided to do, if only because her relationship with Mark had become such a
bore and she was accordingly anxious to expand her romantic horizons a
bit. She felt that Matthew, being an
artist, would be more interesting or, at any rate, less boring. The fact that he also lived in London
prompted her to give him a try."
"But what-on-earth induced him to
write to her after four bloody years!" Peter exclaimed. "I mean, surely he ought to have
forgotten about her by then, considering they hadn't had very much to do with
each other in any case?"
"Yes, so one would imagine,"
Linda agreed. "But you know what
artists can be like. Evidently he's a
little cracked. Either that, or he must
have been extremely hard-up and desperate enough to try anything, even
contacting someone he hadn't seen in years who was basically a stranger to him
at the time. Perhaps, on the other hand,
their brief meeting outside Kenwood House, that day, and subsequent affair made
a stronger impression on him than either we or Gwen could understand."
"Well, it certainly seems strange to
me," Peter confessed, smiling wryly.
"Be that as it may, this Matthew
Pearce isn't quite as interesting as she had hoped," Linda rejoined,
"and principally because he's too serious-minded and so involved with his
art as not to be particularly interested in her as a person. Or so it appears on the surface. For she's now under the impression that he's
somehow disappointed in her and unable, in consequence, to take her
seriously."
Patently puzzled, Peter Daniels asked:
"Disappointed in what way?"
"She doesn't quite know, though she
has a feeling it's because she isn't sufficiently on his progressive wavelength
and may not be as sexually attractive to him as he'd remembered."
Peter Daniels chuckled sarcastically. "One wonders what he could have
remembered after four frigging years!" he remarked. "If the poor fellow's disappointed in her,
it serves him bloody-well right for taking such a gamble. You wouldn't catch me inviting a woman I
hadn't seen in years to meet me for a date or whatever. No way!"
"Yes, well, we're all different,"
Linda smilingly assured him. "And
different we'll doubtless remain."
"Humph! What it really boils down to is that some
people are less sane than others," Peter bluntly declared.
Linda had to laugh. "One of your notorious
over-simplifications," she averred.
"But, seriously, Gwen seems rather upset by the fact of Matthew's
apparent disappointment in her, despite her secret disapproval of his
serious-mindedness. After all, if he
severs connections with her she'll be back to square-one again, back to
occasional visits from Mark and the desire to find someone else. Not that he has shown any immediate desire to
break with her. But she isn't altogether
confident that he won't do so before long.
And she's afraid that her parents haven't made the best of impressions
on him either, especially her father, who apparently started questioning and
arguing with the poor guy almost from the moment he first clapped eyes on
him! Jealousy at first sight would
appear to be the explanation of it."
"Why did she have to invite him to
meet them anyway?" Peter remarked.
"I mean, it wasn't strictly necessary to drag him all the way up to
Northampton just to introduce him to them, surely?"
"No, but I suppose she thought he
might think better of her if she showed him where her parents lived and how
respectable they were," Linda conjectured.
"Make him feel he was associating with the well-to-do, or something
of the kind. You know how snobbish she
can be like that, eager to prove she comes from a solidly middle-class
background and all that. Funny really,
but I suspect it's a result of some kind of inferiority complex she suffers
from, especially where the artistically and/or intellectually perspicacious are
concerned. Yet it appears that her
method of ingratiation in this regard hasn't quite paid off. For Matthew seems not to like the place,
never mind her father. He hasn't said as
much, but she feels that he has somehow clammed-up on her, withdrawn into
himself and left her stranded on the beach of his receding interest. Rather than impressing him, his visit to
their place seems rather to have depressed him."
There then ensued a short reflective
silence on Peter's part before he commented: "So that was the gist of her
conversation, was it?"
"Yes, more or less," Linda
confirmed, nodding. "Not a particularly
inspiring one, to say the least! But
since I phoned her, I suppose I've only got myself to blame. Anyway, I was interested to find out how she
was getting on and what she was doing, not having spoken to her for so
long."
"You'd have found out soon enough
anyway, had you waited for the new school term to start before talking to
her," Peter averred. "I'm sure
she'll tell you all about her problems in more depth when you return to the
teaching grind again."
"I dare say so," Linda agreed,
slightly offended by her husband's lack of sympathy for Gwen. "But that's another week away, and, in
the meantime, we've been invited over to her flat to meet Matthew."
"Oh?
On which day?" Peter wanted to know, turning defensive.
"Either the Thursday or Friday of next
week, depending on his availability," Linda explained. "She said she'd phone me on Tuesday to
finalize it. For she didn't have Matthew
to-hand when I spoke to her and could only give me a provisional date in
consequence. Had I not been ill, these
past three weeks, she said she'd have invited us over to meet him before going
up to Northampton. But, personally, I
can't see that a few days one way or the other makes much difference. After all, it isn't a matter of
life-and-death to us."
"I entirely agree!" said Peter
gruffly. "Though it might have more
significance for Gwen."
"Yes, I incline to think so too,"
Linda chuckled, "especially in view of her current romantic insecurity and
incertitude. For she seems to imagine
that we'll get along well with him - me in particular."
"Not too far along, I hope,"
Peter snorted, throwing back his head in a posture of feigned reproach. "Though if he's an artist, and a
so-called progressive one at that, you ought to have something in common, since
modern art is one of your specialities."
"Was one of my
specialities."
"Still is, so far as I'm
concerned. At least you still paint from
time to time, don't you?"
"Only when I can do so without running
the risk of offending you with the nature of my canvases or the smell of my
paints."
"Oh, come now! I'm not as prohibitive as all that! You needn't wait until my back's turned
before dabbling in paint. I'm not a
bloody schoolmaster, you know. Nor a
gaoler."
"No.
But you aren't exactly a champion of modern art, either. You don't like to see me indulging in
activities you personally take umbrage at."
Peter Daniels emitted a heartfelt
sigh. "Well, of course, I'd much
rather you did something I could relate to, like, for instance,
photography," he asserted.
"Yes, why not? Since we live
together we should do our level best to get on together, to refrain from doing
things that will cause a rift to come between us. Now since you're my wife ..."
"I should presumably do my utmost to
kow-tow to your desires!" Linda interpolated with sarcastic relish,
finishing off what she assumed to be the gist of his statement.
"Well, that's putting it rather
crudely," Peter objected, blushing in the process. "But you might at least do what you can
to prevent unnecessary friction. I mean,
it's too vulgar, too demeaning. My first
marriage was ruined by it, and I have no desire to encourage a repeat
performance in my second one. All I ask
of you is to back me up in my professional endeavours, to offer me support in my
struggle against the decadent and feeble, the world-weary and anarchic - in
short, the enemies of Western civilization!
And to do that you've got to refrain from behaving like an enemy of it
yourself."
"But do you seriously believe that my
paintings turn me into an enemy of Western civilization?" Linda ejaculated
on a wave of intensely sceptical incredulity.
"Some of them do," Peter
averred. "I mean, they're such a
mess, dear. They're a species of
anti-art, not art. One gets the
impression that you simply throw paint onto the canvas without caring
where-the-hell it lands. Now I know
you're not a professional artist. But,
damn it all, why waste time behaving as though you didn't care a jot about the
rules of composition and were only interested in making a pitiful mess!"
"But what are the rules
of composition?" Linda angrily protested, losing patience with her
husband's conservatism. "After all,
there's no one eternal set of sacrosanct rules, you know!"
Becoming angry, as though by contagion, with
his wife's intractability, Peter Daniels sternly countered: "Of course
there is! As far as Western civilization
is concerned, there's a set of rules that apply to painting techniques whatever
the generation one happens to belong to."
"You're talking absolute rubbish and
you know it!" Linda retorted no less sternly.
"Damn you, woman, how can you be so
bloody thick? I mean, if you don't keep
to the rules, you can only frigging-well break them."
"On the contrary, you can only change
them," Linda asseverated defiantly.
"They're not something static, you know. There's continuous evolution. The rules you allude to - and I'm far from sure
which ones you have in mind - were evolved from something earlier and have duly
been superseded by rules more pertinent to the present."
"Rules?" snorted Peter
incredulously. "I can hardly
believe the efforts of most contemporary painters are governed by them!"
"Well, they are!" Linda
declared. "And usually by pretty
stringent ones, too! But let's not waste
our time arguing like this, Pete. It
doesn't exactly contribute towards the harmonious relationship you're always
talking about."
"'Unnecessary friction' was the phrase
I used," he reminded her, calming down a bit, "and this is something
I regard as a certain amount of necessary friction,
if only to impress upon you the importance of avoiding the unnecessary."
"You're becoming quite
irrational," Linda objected, automatically succumbing to a degree of
forced amusement at his expense.
"Your distinction between the one and the other becomes
increasingly arbitrary." She stared
at him in light-hearted bewilderment a moment, then continued: "Anyway,
getting back to the subject of Gwen, I assured her that we'd be available to
meet Matthew on whichever evening she specified. So it's up to her to confirm a date."
"Humph! I wish you hadn't done
anything of the kind, since I probably won't get on with him," Peter
sullenly rejoined. "If he's
avant-garde, he'll probably be too anarchic for my tastes - assuming the word 'avant-garde'
implies what I imagine it to."
"Well, she did say he was into
minimalist and transcendentalist art, but she wouldn't enlarge on it, even when
I pressed her," Linda revealed.
"Apparently, she isn't particularly keen on the subject."
"Then I can't see that I shall be
either, considering our tastes are pretty close," said Peter,
frowning. "Like me, she shies away
from most of the modern stuff."
"Yes, but it's rather unlikely that
we'll be confronted by his work at Gwen's place, isn't it?" Linda
remarked. "After all, it's not his
studio we'll be going to, so there's a fairly good chance you won't have to
take offence at his work. Provided you
don't inquire too deeply into it and refrain from attacking modern art, we
might get along quite pleasantly with him."
"Bah, I shouldn't wish to get along
with an ideological enemy!" exclaimed Peter Daniels in a tone of obdurate
defiance that always suggested to Linda a degree of arrested development in her
husband. "If I don't find out what
kind of art he does, I shan't know how to treat him. I mean, I'll have to probe him to some
extent, if only to get him into perspective.
And if he transpires to being as radical as I assume, from Gwen's
attitude, that he is, then I'll have no option but to tell the bugger what I
think of him and his kind and, if necessary, bloody-well send him to
Coventry! Otherwise I'd be a hypocrite,
wouldn't I? Writing for a periodical
which respects the European classical tradition and strives to be of some
service in stemming the rising flood of inanity and vulgarity in the arts, and
then rubbing shoulders with a man who dedicates the greater part of his time to
the destruction or, at the very least, disruption of that tradition - how could
I possibly allow myself to do that? No,
if he's an enemy of my cause I'll let him know it, believe me!"
"Really, Pete, you take yourself far
too seriously!" Linda chided him.
"It's essentially my cause that I take
seriously, my dear, not myself!" her husband reminded her. "The cause of Western civilization and
all it represents. How can one not be
serious where the life or death of that is
concerned? How can one allow it to
crumble to bits right before one's very eyes?
No, there are some of us who are too lucid to sit back and allow the
destroyers of civilization to have their barbarous way. We have to fight them, impede their
degenerate activities as much as possible.
Else all will be lost. The
libertarian trash will overrun us and we shall all perish. Don't you believe me?"
"I try to, darling, but sometimes I
think you indulge in hyperbole, exaggerating your Spenglerian
pessimism to a point where you're virtually fascist," Linda caustically
opined.
"Fascist?" echoed Peter Daniels
in a tone of outraged innocence.
"No, not that! Simply
conservative."
"Maybe." And not for the first time an overwhelming
sadness descended upon Linda Daniels at the realization of the fundamental and
seemingly ineradicable incompatibility which existed
between them. She wished, at this
moment, that she had never married the man in the first place, never been
gulled by his good looks and considerable wealth into taking him for a
lover. At the time, some ten months ago,
she hadn't known him long enough to be able to form a clear impression of what
he was like, nor had she been confronted by his conservative views to any
appreciable extent and, consequently, had no way of really comparing herself
with him. Now, however, she was in
possession of all the information she needed to disillusion herself with their
relationship, and she felt terribly humiliated by it. Her efforts to align herself with his beliefs
were proving too much for her, and transpired to being a source of
self-betrayal with which she was becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Sooner or later a split would have to come,
if not in her own life, then certainly with him. It was impossible to carry-on deceiving both
him and herself indefinitely. Impossible
and, what's more, morally indefensible!
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday
afternoon came all too quickly and Matthew Pearce was resigned to awaiting the
arrival of Mrs Evans at his Highgate studio to see ('view' would hardly be the
appropriate word in her case) the works, finished or unfinished, which he kept
there. In all, there were at least thirty
canvases and twenty pieces of sculpture to-hand, as well as an indefinite
number of drawings and a few engravings.
Indeed, now that he had cleaned and tidied
the studio up a bit, brought some of his old canvases out of hiding and hidden
some of his new ones away, it seemed to Matthew that it was not so much a
studio as an art gallery in which he was standing, even though there was still
sufficient evidence of his painting utensils and a pervasive smell of stale
paint about the fairly large ground-floor premises which left one in no doubt
as to its actual purpose!
However, the rearrangements which he had
seen fit to make, earlier that day, were not without some justification, in
view of the customary anarchic state of his studio - a thing which Mrs Evans,
with her provincial tidiness, would hardly have welcomed! Recalling the poor impression it had made on
Gwen, a week or so previously, he thought he might as well do what he could to
save her mother from such a fate. After
all, if she was prepared to travel down from Northampton via the West End, she
might as well be provided with something decent to look at, be given an
opportunity to learn something about contemporary art in relatively congenial
surroundings, assuming, of course, that she was really interested in doing so -
an assumption which, Matthew had to admit to himself, was by no means
guaranteed!
For it had occurred to him more than once
during the past couple of days, and even before he arrived back from
Northampton on the Monday, that Mrs Evans might well have an ulterior motive
for visiting him which was less concerned with his art than with himself as a
potential or actual lover. After all,
she had certainly done her best, over the weekend, to make a favourable
impression on him, and, despite his distaste for her provincialism and
comparative ignorance of modern art, she hadn't entirely been without some
success in that respect. She was
unquestionably a very attractive woman, superior to her daughter in some ways,
and not simply because she was older or more sexually mature. One also had to take account of the fact that
she was better-proportioned, which is to say altogether more fleshy and buxom
without being flabby or fat.
Such, at any rate, was how she seemed to
Matthew, who had taken a certain low-key interest in her physical person,
despite the ten-year age gap between them.
And he was mindful, moreover, of what Gwen had told him about her
parents' growing estrangement from each other, the fact of her father's
ill-health having an adverse effect on their marriage. Was it stretching the imagination too far,
therefore, to deduce from this the existence in Deirdre Evans of a degree of
sexual frustration which resulted from her husband's inability to satisfy her
any longer and consequently sought release elsewhere? No, he didn't think so; though he wasn't
prepared to jump to any over-confident conclusions either.
Besides, he wasn't sure he liked Gwen's
mother enough as a person to risk succumbing to carnal intimacies with her,
even if what he supposed was true and she was only too willing, in consequence,
to throw herself into the arms of the first able-bodied man who presented
himself as a suitable replacement for her ailing and, in may ways, distinctly
irascible husband, whether or not the two were connected. Wasn't she a bourgeois, a member of a class
which, with his artist's independence and self-determination, Matthew
instinctively despised? Yes, all too
palpably! Yet, there again, so was her
husband who, if his lifestyle and opinions were anything to judge by, was even
more bourgeois than herself, and consequently all the more despicable from an
artist's standpoint.
Would it not be a kind of revenge,
therefore, to 'have' Mr Evans' wife behind his back, more satisfying even than 'having'
his daughter? There was indeed a vague
possibility that it would be, though deep down Matthew wasn't particularly
impressed by the idea, which seemed of him somehow too mean and underhand. Better to 'have' her simply because she
appealed to him and genuinely desired to be 'had', rather than from a desire
for cold-blooded revenge. But that would
depend on what happened when Mrs Evans arrived, how they got on together, what
she said to him, and so on. He had no
intention of raping the woman just because she might happen, in due course, to
be available and at his mercy. If she
kept him at a distance and only desired to see his art, well and good! He had no intentions of forcing anything upon
her, least of all himself.
It was almost two o'clock when the doorbell
rang and Mrs Evans presented herself to his hospitality in a tight-fitting red
cotton dress. He was politely pleased to
hear that her taxi had found its way to his address without undue difficulty or
hold-up in the traffic, and duly escorted her through the narrow passage which
led from the front door to his studio at the rear. She seemed delighted to be there.
"My, so this is it!" she
exclaimed, as they stepped across the threshold.
Matthew felt under no obligation to answer,
so he simply closed the door behind her and, disdaining ceremony, walked slowly
across to the nearest canvas - a large white one with the outlines of a seated
figure painted in black. It was one of
his meditation illustrations.
Mrs Evans automatically followed him across
the intervening space and stood beside him to contemplate it. She smelt strongly of patchouli, as before,
and wore eye shadow and face powder.
There was more than a hint of bright red lipstick about her mouth. Her fine dark-brown hair, framed by two large
turquoise earrings, was tied-up in a thick plait at the back of her head. Her nape, pale and slender, bore evidence of
a thin gold chain that obviously formed part of a personal necklace. Her arms were bare but for a gold
bracelet. "So this is one of your
Western meditators, I take it?" she commented,
after a short inspection of the canvas.
"In a kind of minimalist
technique," he confirmed.
"Just the bare outlines."
"Hmm, I quite like it actually,"
Mrs Evans admitted.
He felt strangely nervous with the woman
standing so close to him, and also slightly unsure of how best to conduct
proceedings. He reckoned he ought to
have offered her a seat before drawing attention to this painting, asked how
her cousin was and what the baby was like, whether it was a boy or a girl,
etc. But partly through nervousness, and
partly because of the nature of some of his previous reflections, he had felt
strangely inhibited before her and curiously shy, as though afraid to appear
guilty of more than met the eye. The
painting in question served as a kind of support for his verbal impotence at
this moment, but only for a short while.
For already the woman was showing signs of impatience with it and
turning her head in the direction of some of the others. He would have to act. "Well, would you like a cup of tea or
something else to drink prior to your cultural sightseeing, as it were, or
would you prefer me to show you around the, er,
studio now?" He was aware that he
sounded false to himself and still more than a little nervous.
"I think you'd better show me round
first and give me a cup of tea afterwards," she replied without
hesitation. "I really ought to earn
it."
"Yes, I suppose you ought," he
half-humorously agreed, cackling understandingly, and immediately led her past
a couple of similar cross-legged meditating figures to a small canvas on which
a brightly painted white dove appeared to be flying in a silvery-blue sky, as though in a halo of mystical
transcendence.
"Ah, so this is your propaganda of the
Holy Ghost!" Mrs Evans deduced, recalling what he had told her husband on
the subject over the weekend. "My,
it's really quite beautiful!"
Beauty hadn't been Matthew's intention, but
he graciously thanked her for the compliment all the same, which was only to be
expected from somebody who had only a conventional notion of the meaning and
purpose of art. "This is one of my
more successful versions ... unlike the one to its right, which is a shade too
animated," he went on. "The
objective of transcendent tranquillity in optimum truth hasn't quite been
achieved there, owing to the fact that the dove appears to be flapping its
wings rather than just gliding or hovering."
"I can't honestly see any great
difference," she confessed, going up to the second version and
scrutinizing it close-up. "Unless
you're alluding to the higher angle of the wings and to the forward position of
its head in relation to the neck."
"Partly that, but partly also to the
size of the wings, which are a shade too short, too contracted, it might seem,
with the muscular effort of flying," Matthew informed her, unable to
suppress another cackle which was partly a result of the good lady's powers of
observation.
Already Mrs Evans had grown tired of doves
and slight variations in their physical deportment and was heading, to her
host's horrified surprise, in the direction of the next related theme - one
that took the form of an intensely pure globe of silver paint at the centre of
a predominantly gold surround, which could be said to serve as a transcendent
halo for the self-contained globe.
Matthew thought she would remember what this type of painting was
supposed to signify, but she hadn't. Or,
at least, she appeared not to have done.
"This is a more abstract painterly
interpretation of the millennial Beyond," he crisply informed her, as they
came to a sudden halt in front of the work, Matthew fairly proud of his
achievement, Mrs Evans somewhat puzzled and even dazzled by it. "Another symbol of ultimate reality,
universal consciousness, or whatever you prefer to call that which pertains to
pure superconsciousness - the spiritual focus of
transcendental man." He could tell
she was quite impressed by the concept, if still somewhat puzzled. She stared intently at the painting's
mystical cynosure for some time, as though looking for a clue as to the nature
of ultimate reality, but made no constructive comment, evidently because it
wasn't something to which she could properly relate.
There were one or two other equally
puzzling versions of the theme in question to pass before they arrived at the
next variation on a transcendental theme - a medium-sized canvas painted
silver. To Mrs Evans it came as
something of a let-down after the globular one, a thing to be slightly
irritated about. "And what,
exactly, does this signify?" she asked in a faintly condescending
tone-of-voice.
"It's one of my rare experiments in
spatial reality," he calmly replied.
"After the manner of the late Yvres
Klein, who painted monochromes with a view to creating real space, in which the
viewer becomes mystically and optically immersed rather than simply passively
curious. It isn't a form of abstraction
so much as a delineation of space. Hence
in this kind of work one is a spatial realist."
"Really?" Mrs Evans responded
half-sceptically, the hint of a smirk upon her luscious lips. For it wasn't a work she was prepared to take
seriously. To her, space was exclusively
of the air and sky, not something one could immerse oneself in on a
canvas! She didn't much care for the
idea of looking too intently at a bright silver monochrome, nor, for that
matter, at the gold and pale-blue ones beside it. There wasn't much there to look at, after
all.
Sensing her impatience, Matthew drew the
woman in the direction of his sculpture, some of which he knew she would
appreciate, if only because, in taking the forms of doves and meditating
figures, it was largely representational.
He didn't think it expedient to impose the plexiglas
and acrylic biomorphic sculptures inspired by the more transcendental
sculptors, like Gabo and Beasley, upon her at this
point, so led the way, instead, to his overtly religious works, which stood
together on a small table to the right of his paintings. Mrs Evans seemed decidedly pleased at the
sight of them all.
"So these are you sculptured
doves!" she exclaimed, automatically picking up the nearest one to-hand
and gently stroking its smooth back.
"I'd quite forgotten about them, actually." She suddenly became self-conscious of her
action and blushed slightly. "I do
hope you don't mind my picking it up," she apologized, fearing that he
would be offended.
"Not at all," he assured
her. "They ought to bear being
stroked, considering that sculpture is fundamentally a tactile art."
She smiled her appreciation of this
esoteric fact and turned the small dove over and over in her hands, looking at
it from a variety of angles.
"That one, as you doubtless realize,
happens to be in marble," he remarked.
"But I've also done one in lignum vitae ..." he
pointed it out "... and another in bronze ..." which he also pointed
out. "More recently, however, I've
constructed one out of nylon strings and a steel frame ..." again he
pointed to the relevant sculpture "... which, from a transcendental
viewpoint, I regard as my best work to-date." He was conscious, as he spoke, that he had
lost his initial nervousness and become almost overbearing in his eagerness to
inform her of his cultural achievements, to impress his creative significance
upon her. She was no longer someone to
be feared as a potential critic, but simply someone to instruct, enlighten, and
convert. Yet this consciousness,
momentarily intruding itself between the sight of his religious sculptures and
his comments on them, caused him to lose a little of his didactic absorption,
his self-confidence, and grow conscious of the figure standing beside him as a
woman again, and a very attractive and sweet-smelling one, to boot! However, he was not to be thrown off course
but continued: "Hopefully I shall be able to proceed to more transcendent
versions of the dove and, for that matter, the beatific meditators
in due course, making use of transparent plastic materials and possibly acrylic
to obtain the desired effect. At present
I'm not altogether satisfied with the use of marble, bronze, and wood, which
seem to me somewhat outdated. I need to
bring the symbol of the Holy Ghost more up-to-date, to spiritualize it as much
as possible. Else I'll be working at
cross-purposes, if you see what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do," Mrs Evans
assured him, returning the marble dove in her hand to its space beside the
others on the table. "At least I
recall what you told me in the garden of my house about it - in other words, of
the need to use synthetic materials in accordance with the artificial nature of
the contemporary urban environment."
"Precisely," Matthew agreed, not
a little surprised by the fact that she had in fact remembered all that,
despite the manifest paradox of the phrase 'artificial nature'. "It's a matter of responding to the
environment in which one lives in an appropriately relevant way. And the modern city inspires a degree of
transcendentalism quite unprecedented in the history of man. Whether one is talking of acrylic, biomorphics, punk rockers with green or blue hair, computer
dating, light shows, lasers, contraceptives, skyscrapers with more window-space
than concrete or metal infills, supersonic aircraft,
digital watches, or cassette recorders, it all comes down to the same thing -
namely, our growing severance from the sensual and greater predilection for the
spiritual, for the superconscious as opposed to the
subconscious. That's why our art, no
less than everything else these days, is generally what it is, and why an
ever-increasing number of us are more inclined to meditate than to pray."
"Presumably including you," Mrs
Evans commented, turning her attention away from the small sculptures of
meditating figures to the man beside her.
"Yes, from time to time," he
admitted, breaking into a mild blush at what appeared to be a gently mocking
look in her bright eyes. "Not that
I'm a fanatic. But I do find it pleasant
to indulge in when the mood takes me.
It's a form of relaxation, you know."
"Really?" Mrs Evans seemed interested. "And do you come face-to-face with the
Holy Spirit or whatever when you do it?" she asked.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking I
suppose one does," he replied.
"At least one gets into a state of mind in which peace,
tranquillity, stillness, even bliss predominate, and that seems to me very
heavenly. It brings one into contact
with the reality beyond appearances, beyond verbal concepts in the ego-bound
self, which mystics tend to equate with the Godhead. One gets out of one's shadow and into the
light. That's the important thing about
it, and that's essentially why one does it - to get away from the illusory and
strive to experience undiluted truth. One
tunes-in to one's superconscious mind and is lifted
above the petty worries and miseries of diurnal life. Lifted above the sway of the subconscious to
the realm of pure spirit. It's a
pleasant experience, believe me, this wavelength of tranquillity and blessed
peace!"
"Well, seeing as you've intrigued me
about it, perhaps you'd be kind enough to give me a lesson," Mrs Evans
proposed, gently smiling. "If it's
not a mode of religious solemnity but a form of spiritual relaxation, I don't
see why I shouldn't give it a try.
Unless, however, you've got better or more pressing things to
do?" She stared at him
half-curiously, half-mockingly.
Matthew Pearce was indeed surprised! This was the last thing he had expected her
to say! He didn't quite know how to reply,
never having been confronted with the prospect of teaching a woman to meditate
before - least of all in his studio! It
was rather unnerving. But there were,
after all, a couple of cushions on the floor not far from where he stood, large
puffy velvet-covered cushions which he habitually used when meditating or just
resting prior or subsequent to work. So
there was no reason to suppose it wasn't possible to utilize the studio for
purposes of spiritual instruction. He
had no real alternative, therefore, but to consent to her proposal and teach
or, at any rate, make a stab at teaching her to meditate.
"And you say it's easy," Mrs
Evans murmured, as he led her across the intervening space to where the
cushions lay.
"Very," he affirmed, bending down
to arrange them in an acceptable manner, one in front of the other at a
distance of about three feet; though, in point of fact, he wasn't so confident
where she was concerned. Perhaps she
would be too egocentric?
She put her white handbag onto a table not
far from where they were now standing and then proceeded to survey the area in
which Matthew proposed to instruct her in meditation. It was perfectly clean and brightly lit by a
large window which gave on to a neatly trimmed and secluded back-garden - all
in all, quite a pleasant prospect! The
weather, fortunately, was still unusually fine.
"Now, ideally, you should sit down
upon one of these cushions, like this, and cross your legs," he averred,
leading the way with an unselfconscious demonstration. "Though if, on account of your
close-fitting dress, you would prefer to kneel ..."
But Mrs Evans had already taken to her
cushion in a manner similar to Matthew and made an effort to cross her legs,
exposing, to his startled gaze, the greater part of her copious thighs, which
were not without a certain seductive potency.
Indeed, her dress had ridden so far up her legs, as she sat down, that
he could see more than a little of her nylon panties, which were pale pink, about
the area of her crotch. He was unable to
prevent himself from blushing a similar colour at the sight of them!
"Perhaps I ought to remove my
dress," Mrs Evans suggested, realizing that its displacement had become
both a source of distraction for Matthew and not altogether comfortable for herself. "It might be better if I had a bit more
physical freedom."
"Well, it isn't absolutely necessary
for you to sit cross-legged," he reminded her, blushing a shade
deeper. But before he could say anything
else she had got to her feet, turned her back on him, and started to unzip her
dress which, because of its tightness, she was obliged to ease to the floor,
revealing, to his astonished gaze, one of the most attractive figures the mind
of man could ever hope to rest upon - a figure in which rump and thighs
conspired to seduce the eye to a mouth-watering appreciation of the flesh. Then as she bent down to pick up her dress,
threw it in the direction of the nearby table, and bent down again to remove
her high heels, Matthew became so conscious of the curvaceous seductiveness of
the flesh in question ... that he could scarcely take his eyes off it,
especially since she was wearing but the skimpiest of briefs through which the
mound of her pubic bush was darkly visible.
He was almost drooling with incipient lust as she turned around to face
him again and, aided by a no-less skimpy brassiere, confronted him with frontal
charms the likes of which he hadn't seen in years.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting,"
she nonchalantly remarked, as she sat down in front of him in the rudiments of
a cross-legged position. "Now, what
do I do next?"
Matthew wasn't altogether sure. Or, rather, he was beginning to wonder
whether she could still be serious. But
he made an effort to pretend that he had been unaffected by her impromptu
striptease, and duly proceeded with a word of advice concerning the necessity
of emptying the mind of distracting thoughts.
"Just relax as much as possible and listen-in to such thoughts as
still occur to you without passing judgement on them, as though they weren't
really yours." He felt peculiarly
self-conscious with her sharp eyes directly focused upon him, drilling, it
seemed, into the depths of his mind. He
wondered if she was secretly mocking him now, what with that cool regard. Did he look more distracted than he
felt? Somewhat embarrassed perhaps? He tried not to dwell on the
possibility. "Now that you are
aware of your thinking mind as a kind of separate entity," he continued,
ignoring his subjective insecurity as best he could, "you can listen-in to
your breathing as though that, too, came from outside you and wasn't strictly
dependent on your conscious control.
Just let your breathing take care of itself. Let it happen to
you." He felt even more
self-conscious under the resolute fixity of her stare, which seemed to indicate
a certain disappointment in him, an impatience with the pedantic course of
events. He wanted to escape from it, to
hide from her. "And as you become
aware of your breathing, er, happening to you, you'll
find that you can increase its flow, making it gradually deeper with the
inhalation, smoother and more precipitant with the exhalation, allowing your
breath to tumble out of you, so to speak, of its own accord." His words were sounding increasingly false and
strained to him, especially as her posture was insufficiently straight. In fact, it appeared to have sagged slightly
forwards, causing the upper halves of her breasts to become more conspicuous
than before. A little further and she
might have toppled over onto him, her eyes still fixedly staring into his face,
as though for a clue to the millennial Beyond.
Abandoning the relative physical comfort of
his cushion, he crawled over to a position immediately behind her, as much to
escape her Zen-like stare as to correct her posture, and advised her to
straighten up a little, placing a hand on her back to encourage such an
adjustment. He was made acutely aware,
in the process, of her perfume, which teased his nostrils and gave him a degree
of nasal pleasure he had rarely experienced from standard perfumes before. It seemed stronger and sweeter than anything
Gwen was in the habit of using.
"Now continue to breathe more consciously with the inhalation and
less consciously with the exhalation," he advised her, as soon as she had
responded to his previous advice, "using gradually deeper and deeper
breaths, in and out, in and out, in ... and ... out." He adjusted his position slightly and, as
though partly in response to his breathing instructions and partly in response
to the inviting proximity of her body, slid his hands under her arms and around
to the bulging contours of her breasts, cupping them in each hand and applying
a little extra pressure in accordance with the demands of the in-breaths,
relaxing his pressure with the out-breaths, so that the steady "in ... and
... out, in ... and ... out" of her breathing routine acquired physical
support. He realized, all too soon, that
her breathing was becoming progressively quicker as well as deeper, doubtless
due to his presence immediately behind her and the effect of his physical
assistance. It was also acquiring, in
response to the variable pressure of his hands upon her breasts, a certain
vocal accompaniment not ordinarily associated with meditation - a sighing and
moaning which suggested the onslaught of sensual abandon. He wondered whether he hadn't better draw
away from her before he got too physically involved. But, as though in anticipation of some such
retreat, Mrs Evans suddenly reached her hands back behind herself and unclipped
her bra, with the inevitable consequence that, following further promptings on
her part, it slid away from her breasts, leaving his hands stranded, as it
were, on the heaving mounds of naked flesh.
"In ... and ... out, in ... and ... out" he continued, growing
all the time more excited and sensuously committed to her physical beauty
himself.
Yet now that he felt the soft, smooth
surface of her naked breasts against his fingers, it was only a matter of time,
more precisely a few seconds, before they closed over her nipples and he
proceeded to caress them gently and slowly, backwards and forwards, to the
mounting accompaniment, now somewhat more uninhibited, of her sighings and moanings. Already she had turned her head back towards
him, resting it on his nearest shoulder, and he found himself kissing her neck
and shoulder blade, becoming ever more turned-on by the sweet perfume behind
her ears. From the neck to the cheek,
the cheek to the mouth, and the mouth to the tongue ... required only a slight
adjustment of their respective limbs, an adjustment which made it perfectly
beyond doubt that he had been successfully seduced by Mrs Evans and was now
unequivocally committed to exploring the potential for sensual gratification which
her maturely attractive body held out to him.
"Ah, Matthew, you shouldn't ...” she
gently reproved him, as he became progressively bolder, stretching out a hand
to caress her between the thighs while simultaneously applying his tongue to
the protruding nipple of one of her breasts.
"You mustn't do this," she added. "I thought you were teaching me to
meditate, to gain spiritual insight.
You're not going to fuck me surely, not after what you said you'd
do? Really, Matthew, I don't know how
..."
But he had already removed from her heaving
body the final flimsy obstacle to his sexual objective, and was now struggling
to remove his own rather more substantial obstacles to it, whilst endeavouring
to maintain the impetus of his carnal assault and thus keep her sexually
aroused. He knew enough about the devil
in woman not to be impressed by Mrs Evans' low-key reproaches, which seemed, in
any case, specifically designed to channel and further inflame his passion. He knew exactly what she wanted and, as much
from the promptings of the demon in himself as from the devil in her, he
intended to let her have it, to make her squirm in an ecstasy of sensual
abandon, forgetting who or where she was and even who she was with. If her husband, with his failing health, had
been unable to satisfy her, then Matthew Pearce would make doubly sure he did,
applying to her body the physical commitment which recent circumstances had
prevented him from applying to Gwen. He
wouldn't let her go until he had fully expended himself on her, avenging
himself not only on her beauty but on her husband as well - indeed, on the
entire bourgeois establishment of which this woman was but an epitome, a
microcosm of the whole. If it was
sensuality she was really after, he would do his level best to make sure she
got it, even if he had to go through hell in the process!
"Ah, Matthew ..." she was moaning
as, freed from his constricting jeans and underpants, he applied himself to her
distended sex with a vigour he never suspected himself capable of, so long was
it since he had really screwed a woman - a real sensuous woman and not a frigid
simulacrum of one, like Gwen.
"You'll kill me, Matthew.
You'll break me. Ah, no, not so
violently, not so deeply!" Mrs Evans feebly protested. "My God, I never thought you'd be so
virile! You'll rupture me. Ah, free me, take me, do it harder,
Matthew! Still more, aaaaahhhgh
..." Her delirium mounted in
intensity, reached a peak of unintelligibility, and slowly trailed off after
she had succumbed to her orgasm and been freed from the mounting tension which
his thrusts, ever quicker and deeper, imperiously inspired. She took his climax with scarcely a murmur,
submerged, as she already was, in a sea of warm sensual gratification. Her body had become sex from head to feet,
not just in the pubic region where it was focused. Rather, it had been subtly diffused
throughout her, like a ray of bright sunshine, causing sensations she hadn't
experienced in years to float to the surface and bask in its gentle warmth. She was left agreeably speechless as his
passion reached its consummation and began to ebb away, gradually withdrawing
from her as from a foreign beach. It was
withdrawing, yes, but it had left its mark on her, left the imprint of its
flow! She hadn't known this degree of
cathartic release in years. She could
hardly recognize herself. "Don't
leave me, darling," she murmured, reaching out a restraining hand to her
lover's neck as he began to disengage himself from her tender flesh. She was afraid that his total withdrawal
would cause her to plunge back into the memory of her old self, the self from
which she had temporarily escaped.
Gently he bent down over her again and
kissed her lengthily on the mouth, allowing his tongue to meet hers in a whirlpool
of sensual caressing. He felt that he
could choke her with the force of his pressure on her tongue; that, by a
renewed burst of passion, he could drive his tongue down her throat whilst
simultaneously driving his penis deeper into her cleft vagina under the
perverse notion that the one would eventually meet-up with the other somewhere
in the pit of her stomach, and so bring him into the utmost physical and even
metaphysical intimacy with her. It was
as though, with the python-like tightening of her grip about him and his sexual
responses to it, they were desperately trying to merge their separate bodies
into one writhing being, to become fused together in an ecstasy of
undifferentiated carnality. But, of course,
he knew there were strict limits to the degree of his carnal commitment to her
which could not be transgressed without the desire for increased sexual
gratification turning into a form of sadism, so he wisely refrained from
choking her with his tongue and began, instead, to playfully caress it in
response to her wishes. He, too, was
afraid to abandon her and face-up, albeit from a different angle, to the
immediate consequences of his actions.
It was easier, for the time being, to sample a little more of her body,
to play along with the pretence of innocence which now prevailed between them.
Yet it wasn't long before he felt obliged
to desist from his attentions and repulse her renewed attempt to kindle the
dying embers of his passion. The
weariness of having expended oneself and done what there was to do with a woman
of her sort had come upon him, rendering the pursuit of further pleasure all
but impossible. The limit of sensual
gratification had been reached. Beyond
it, barring the possibility of sadism, there was only the madness and futility
of superfluous kissings and fondlings,
of a mere physical engagement without enthusiasm or passion, a fall from
metaphysical grace. Sated as he now was,
her body had suddenly become a repugnant thing to him, unable to perpetuate
further pleasure.
He pushed her unreasonably imploring hands
away from himself and stumbled towards his clothes, which lay heaped together
on the floor not far from hers. He got
dressed quickly and quietly, almost self-consciously ashamed of his nudity and
the concomitant fact that he was, after all, a separate person, different and
remote. He didn't want his body to be
exposed as the repugnant thing Mrs Evans' body had suddenly become to him. He was conscious of a sort of fall from
spiritual grace. Conscious, too, that he
had allowed himself to be seduced by her at the very time when he was most
intent upon teaching her to meditate. It
came as a kind of condemnatory blow to him, this secondary consciousness, and
made him feel both ashamed and humiliated.
It was as though the illusion of his spiritual probity had been
shattered by the ease with which Mrs Evans had achieved her carnal
objectives. Hitherto, no such temptation
had presented itself, least of all from an attractive married woman, and he was
accordingly able to sustain a comforting belief in the earnestness of his
spiritual endeavour and the commendable extent of his fidelity to it. Yet now that he had succumbed to the flesh at
the very time when he ought to have shown loyalty to the spirit, he was less
confident that he was in fact as spiritually earnest as he had previously
imagined himself to be! Perhaps, on the
other hand, his spiritual pretensions were largely a consequence of the
regrettable fact that social, professional, ideological, and financial circumstances
had not hitherto particularly favoured his romantic or sex life, making it
necessary for him to seek compensation for and oblivion from his solitary
plight in spiritual strivings?
No, that couldn't be! He refused to acknowledge the possibility! It was far too humiliating, altogether too
self-effacing! He had always known
himself to be a predominantly spiritual being, an extreme ectomorph,
or thin man, with intellectual motivations.
There could be no question of his being confounded with L'homme moyen sensuel, the average sensual man. But why, then, had he succumbed to Mrs Evans'
seductive influence with so little hesitation or resistance? Was it simply because of her exceptional good-looks? Or was it because of the ten-year age gap
between them which, besides exciting his curiosity, endowed her with a sort of
moral authority over him? Or was it,
perhaps, because of her bourgeois status and a correlative desire, on his part,
to avenge himself on her in some way, either on account of her husband or Gwen
or indeed, by association, the bourgeois establishment in general? In all probability, all three considerations
had played a part and possibly one or two others besides, though he couldn't
determine to what extent. All he knew
for certain was that he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and deeply humiliated
by what he had done. If his religious
pretensions could be shattered so easily, what hope was there that he could
prevent the same thing from happening again in future, either with Mrs Evans or
someone like her?
Indeed, how would those pretensions now
appear to the woman herself, she who had so easily succeeded in overcoming
them? How convinced would she be, on the
evidence of his carnal appetite, that he was in fact as spiritual as, largely
through his paintings and sculptures, he made himself out to be? She would probably be laughing at him behind
his back, mocking him for his inconsistencies.
Yes, why not? Hadn't she won a
victory over him and exploited his moral weakness at the very time when it
would be most vulnerable to attack, when his spiritual pretensions were most
clearly exposed and a victory over them prove correspondingly more
gratifying? Yes, indeed she had! Her sensuality had overcome his spirituality
at the very moment when it was most exposed to its own pretensions and had
gobbled it up - lock, stock, and fucking barrel. No wonder she had implored him to stay with
her longer!
Turning round to face her, he saw, with
resentful eyes, that she had got to her feet and was in the process of getting
dressed, pulling her slender briefs into place over the mound of dark pubic
hair that crowned her sex. She appeared
perfectly content with herself, which wasn't altogether surprising really,
considering that she had got what she wanted.
To a certain extent she had no further need of him, just as he had no
further need of her. No further sexual
need, at any rate; though he couldn't help admiring the ample bulk of her
thighs and the generous curve of her hips, as she lowered her dress over her
head preparatory to covering them. There
could be no denying her physical attractiveness!
She smiled warmly at him as she eased her
dress back into place and invited him, with an appropriate twist on her heels,
to zip her up, which he obligingly did, though not before taking one last
lingering look at her smooth back, the smooth nature of which both charmed and
fascinated him. "You aren't angry
with me, are you?" she asked, turning around to face him and placing an
affectionate, almost maternal hand on his arm.
"Of course not!" he automatically
replied, a faint blush suffusing his cheeks in telltale self-abnegation, as he
fought against the sordid temptation to reveal what he really felt. It was no use being frank with her.
"And not angry with yourself, I
trust?" she inquired.
"No."
"Good!
That's as it should be. I was a
little worried about you actually."
"Oh, in what way?"
Mrs Evans resumed her warm, teasing smile and
lightly squeezed his arm, as though to kindle a spark of his former passion
from it. "About the extent of your
spiritual commitment principally," she revealed. "The degree of your spiritual
earnestness."
Matthew blushed more deeply, almost like a
shy adolescent. "I don't quite
understand," he said.
"Well, I thought perhaps you were a
little too spiritual for your own good, a little too ascetically earnest,"
Mrs Evans informed him, vaguely waving a hand in the direction of the paintings
and sculptures to their right. "I
was afraid, from the nature of your work, that you were rather too preoccupied
with transcendentalism, virtually obsessed by it. But I'm glad to say that you aren't
altogether immune to fleshy enticements, and that I was accordingly able to
broaden your horizon a little. And I'm
no-less glad to say that you gave me more sexual satisfaction than my husband
has done, over the past five or six years.
You're not at all a bad lover, actually."
Matthew didn't know whether to be grateful
for this unexpectedly frank piece of information or further ashamed of himself,
so overwhelmed was he by conflicting emotions.
To some extent it delivered him from a number of pessimistic
suppositions concerning himself or, rather, his sexual performance. But, all the same, it didn't exactly flatter
his spiritual integrity! It was like a
kiss and a slap on the face at the same time.
He had been set up as a lover, only to be knocked down as a sage. Her frankness disarmed him.
"Yet all these doves and meditating
figures had me worried for a time, I must confess," Mrs Evans resumed,
ignoring his ambivalent facial expression, "and got me to thinking that
perhaps you weren't really a man at all but a kind of deity or angel or
something. At least I now know that,
even with all your transcendental loyalties and noble strivings, you're
essentially a man, and a jolly good one too!
For what is man, after all, but a creature balanced between the sensual
and the spiritual in harmony with the laws of what mankind should be?"
Matthew winced perceptibly with this
paradoxical comment. For it was almost
painful for him to have to listen to it.
"Man isn't a creature that's fixed in its ways or being, like an
animal," he sternly countered, "but an evolutionary experiment, a
continuous transformation. If he began
as a beast, he must end as a god. Or, to
put it more concretely, he must slough off more and more of his beastliness as
he evolves towards a higher state of being, one in which only the spiritual
counts for anything."
"Now you're talking nonsense!"
Mrs Evans opined half-jokingly.
"You're trying to contradict your own manhood no sooner than five
minutes after I've had first-hand experience of it."
"Not at all!" Matthew
protested. "I'm merely saying that
this balance you refer to is an illusion, a temporary situation, and that man
needn't necessarily be forced into any particular mould." Yet, once again, he realized that he was
speaking to a bourgeois, a species of 'man' whose mean it was to be balanced in
the aforesaid manner, and that she could no more be expected to share his view
than he ... hers. What she understood by
'man' was essentially egocentric man, man in his prime as man - the
middle stage in the spectrum of human evolution. It was the mean of D.H. Lawrence, as of Rampion, the Lawrence-like character in Huxley's Point
Counter Point, a mean that signified a sensual/spiritual integrity, an
all-roundedness of being which fought shy of saints and sinners alike, being
prepared to brand all those who didn't or couldn't subscribe to its dualistic
integrity as failures or perverts. To go
beyond the dualistic mean was, to its devotees, just as bad as, if not worse
than, failing to come up to it. Either
way, one would not be a man, which, in a sense, was true. That is to say, one would not be man in his
prime as man - a bourgeois. No,
one would be either an early or a late man, a subman
or a superman. If early, then one would be
lopsided on the side of the subconscious and thus ... predominantly sensual,
fundamentally pagan. If late, on the
other hand, one would be lopsided on the side of the superconscious
and thus ... predominantly spiritual, essentially transcendental. The subman, being
closer to the beasts, would be inferior to the balanced, egocentric man. The superman, being closer to the godlike,
would be his superior. Now, naturally,
if one is in-between these two extremes one isn't going to endorse the
superiority of the spiritually lopsided man, even if, at least tacitly, one
inclines to look down upon the pagan.
No, as a bourgeois, one remains loyal to oneself, since anything else
would be self-defeating.
Accordingly one dismisses the lopsided as
failures or perverts, content with the assumption that the mean is ever
dualistic and cannot be bettered. Yet
the fact is that, contrary to the bourgeois' complacent entrenchment in
relativity, it can and is being bettered, and by no less than the spiritually lopsided! If they are not yet godly, testifying to the
complete sovereignty of the superconscious over the
subconscious, they are at least on the road to eventually becoming such, being
a good deal closer to the culmination of human evolution in the millennial Beyond
than ever their egocentric detractors or bourgeois predecessors were, and
consequently of a more fortunate disposition.
But Matthew had to admit to himself that
such knowledge was hardly likely to make a profound impression on Mrs Evans,
who seemed to be too resigned to the dualistic mean to have any use for
whatever stood above it. And so he
refrained from launching out in defence of lopsided spirituality, contenting
himself, instead, with an ironic smile and shrug of the shoulders, as though to
impress upon her the futility of their arguing about it. Besides, hadn't his passion for her body
demonstrated that he was not all that far removed from such a balanced dualism
himself, but only incipiently transcendental or, at any rate, of a
consciousness which was probably compounded of no more than two-thirds superconscious mind and one-third subconscious mind,
leaving room for a fair amount of sensuality?
As it happened, he wasn't exactly in the strongest of positions to
defend transcendentalism from the claims of dualism. Neither, for that matter, were the vast
majority of latter-day transcendentalists, who were probably little further
advanced than himself along the long and narrow road that led to the post-human
millennium, and thus to the possibility of ultimate salvation. Yet at least one had the consolation of
knowing that one belonged to a class of persons which would eventually reach
paradise, even if it took a number of decades or even centuries.
Meanwhile Mrs Evans had put on her black
high-heels, straightened her nylon stockings, and tidied her hair, using the
small portable mirror she habitually carried in her handbag to check and modify
her facial appearance into the bargain.
She seemed to have grown tired of discussing the nature of man too,
since more interested in herself and the application of a smear or two of
lipstick to her sensuously pouting lips.
Then she turned back to Matthew and, with gentle application of a paper
tissue, wiped some lipstick from his face, commenting all the while on his
funny appearance. "You could be
taken for some kind of half-arsed punk," she joked in quasi-American
fashion, as the last traces of its smear were gently removed from his cheeks.
For an instant he wanted to kiss her anew,
so attractive did she seem all of a sudden.
But he realized that he would only succeed in getting her to reciprocate
and thereby mess-up his face all over again.
"Now we wouldn't want Gwen to discover
you've been making love to a woman who wears bright-red lipstick, would we?"
she added, with a teasingly conspiratorial look in her eyes.
"No, I guess not," he
conceded. "Especially when that
woman was her mother."
"Quite!" Mrs Evans agreed. "It wouldn't help to improve your
relationship any." She turned away
from him and, with nervous hesitation, duly returned the crumpled,
lipstick-smeared tissue to her handbag.
Her face in profile appeared exquisitely refined, more so than her
daughter's ever did. A sudden beam of
light shooting through the window caused the bright red of her dress to be
momentarily intensified, making it appear as though she were on fire. A hairgrip on her piled-up mass of hair
sparkled like a diamond. She turned back
towards him, losing some of the otherworldly significance which the sun had
gratuitously and even paradoxically granted her. "Now then," she murmured,
"what about that cup of tea you promised me earlier?"
CHAPTER SIX
The
following Thursday evening Matthew Pearce set off by taxi for Gwen's Chelsea
flat, in accordance with the invitation he had received, a few days previously,
to meet a couple of her friends there - namely Peter and Linda Daniels. Since he hadn't seen Gwen since Monday,
following their joint return from Northampton, he was rather looking forward to
the visit, if only to quieten his conscience a little over the affair with her
mother. The fact that, contrary to all
previous arrangements, he had told her not to visit him Wednesday afternoon ...
was still troubling his peace-of-mind; though he felt relatively confident that
the excuse he had made about having important work to do was fundamentally
cogent, and therefore wouldn't arouse her suspicions in any way. Nevertheless he was anxious to see her, in
order to be left in absolutely no doubt concerning her innocence of his real
motives. Besides, he wanted to be near
her and, if possible, to improve his relations with her as a kind of defence
against Mrs Evans, whom he was afraid might wish to make a habit of visiting
his studio and thus exposing him to the risk of emotional attachment.... Not
that she had made any immediate arrangements to visit him again, or indeed
claimed his time beyond a couple of hours the previous afternoon. But he was less than confident that she
wouldn't do so in future, especially as she had found him so sexually
satisfying and was unlikely to get on better sexual terms with her ailing
husband.
Arriving at Gwen's address at about
seven-thirty, he rang the bell and was duly admitted by the young lady in
person, who seemed pleased to see him and relieved that he had in fact been
able to make it after all, contrary to his initial misgivings about the evening
in question.
"Have your friends arrived yet?"
he asked, following her up the thickly carpeted wooden stairs to her
second-floor apartment.
"Just a few minutes ago," she
replied, glancing over her shoulder at the denim-clad ascending figure
behind. "Which was pretty good
timing on their part, too."
He was led into the lounge and introduced
first to Peter and then to Linda Daniels, the former extending a rather stiff
white hand, the latter a more flexible black one.
"Glad to meet you," he averred,
as he shook hands with each of the Daniels and briefly scanned their faces - the
man's firm and set, rather hard and aristocratic; the woman's, by contrast,
quite fluid and gentle, pleasantly serene.
He took an immediate liking to her, though the husband repelled him a
little and immediately put him on his guard.
"So you're the artist Gwen has been
telling us about," Peter Daniels remarked, no sooner than the
introductions had run their customary course.
"Yes, I guess so," said Matthew,
smiling.
"Well, I'm a writer myself, of mostly
journalistic tendency, though occasionally a poet and novelist as well,"
Peter Daniels declared. "And my
wife is a fellow-teacher at Gwendolyn’s school."
"A physical education teacher if I
remember correctly, isn't it?" Matthew responded, recalling to mind what
he had already learnt from Gwen.
"Yes, unfortunately so," Linda
admitted, with a gentle self-deprecatory sigh.
"I think she would rather be an art
teacher actually," Gwen opined, for the artist's benefit.
"Is that so?"
"Well, not specifically," Linda
admitted. "Though I do have an
interest in art, both ancient and modern."
Peter Daniels frowned enigmatically, or at
least that's how it appeared to Matthew.
"I suppose your interest is chiefly in the modern, is it?" he
said to the latter, who, at Gwen's request, had just sat down in a nearby
armchair.
"Well, as a practising artist I guess
it has to be," he replied.
"I'm not one to either copy or strive to emulate the old masters,
you know."
"Ah, so you're
anti-representational?" Peter Daniels conjectured enigmatically.
The inference struck Matthew as a bit odd,
but he smiled and simply said: "Not so much anti-representational as
pro-transcendental."
Peter Daniels raised his brows in acute
surprise. "And what exactly is
that?" he asked.
Matthew attempted to explain, using as few
words as possible, the basis of his allegiance to the Holy Ghost and
correlative penchant for the superconscious. However, the journalist transpired not to
being particularly impressed by his explanation, having no prior knowledge of
the superconscious and its role in shaping the
arts. To him, it sounded like a figment
of the imagination. And not only that
but, worse still, a threat to his egocentric integrity, with its empirical objectivity. He had no desire to revise his philosophical
viewpoint of Spenglerian pessimism and opposition to
decadence, including, not least of all, its mystical manifestations. He was a champion of Western civilization,
with its scientific rationality, and he lost no time in letting the transcendentalist
know it! Needless to say, Matthew was
somewhat taken-aback, suddenly confronted, as he now was, by a sense of deja vu in the presence of what seemed to him like a carbon copy of
Gwen's father. "I don't quite
understand you," he confessed.
"Well, whether you realize it or
not," Peter Daniels rejoined, with an air of didactic earnestness,
"Western civilization is seriously threatened by certain destructive
elements in contemporary society whose only desire is to bring about its
complete and utter downfall, and so enable the opponents of civilization to
triumph. The decline of the West, as
outlined by Spengler in his seminal work of that
name, is an indisputable fact which cannot be denied, no matter how repugnant
it may appear to us or, at any rate, to those of us with an interest in
preventing and perhaps even reversing its decline. It's an extremely regrettable fact, but there
it is! The enemies of Western
civilization, who patently include mystical transcendentalists of a
non-empirical disposition, are slowly but steadily gaining the
ascendancy."
Matthew was virtually thunderstruck. He could scarcely believe his ears! Was this what he
had come along to Gwen's flat to hear - the prejudices of a reactionary
bourgeois? He was almost on the point of
exploding with laughter. "But the
civilization to which you allude," he responded, as soon as he could get
over the initial shock of what he had just heard, "is being superseded by
that which stands above it and signifies the next and probably final rung on
the ladder of human evolution. If
anything is in decline it's only the bourgeois world, which cannot last for
ever but is destined to be superseded in due course. Indeed, it has already been superseded to a
large extent, as a cursory glance at the contemporary world, with its photography
and films and pop music, would adequately confirm."
Peter Daniels seemed not to have heard
aright. "Are you seriously trying
to tell me that what's currently happening to our civilization is for the
better?" he objected incredulously.
"Yes, naturally," Matthew
maintained. "It may not be for the
better as far as the bourgeoisie are concerned, but it's certainly so for the
proletariat, who have largely superseded them.
If bourgeois civilization didn't decline - and it's no longer in
effective operation anyway - there would be a frightful stasis, a horrible
permanence of egocentric dualism, which it would be impossible to endure. I mean, what could be more absurd and
fundamentally tragic than that? The idea
simply doesn't bear thinking about! Fortunately,
however, life is a perpetual evolution, not a permanent stasis, so we needn't
fear that the changes which are occurring to and in our society are inevitably
for the worse. We're climbing up higher,
not falling down lower."
"Bullshit!" cried Peter Daniels,
who had become flushed from suppressed rage.
"How can so many of the changes which have come over the Western
and, in particular, West European world this century possibly signify progress? Are you seriously trying to tell me that
modern art, for instance, is superior to traditional art - to the
representational art, shall we say, of the 16-19th centuries?"
"Superior in one respect it most
certainly is," Matthew affirmed, trying to avoid thinking of Mr
Evans. "It's not so much balanced
between illusion and truth as distinctly biased on the side of truth,
distinctly a product of the superconscious, with its
non-representational subjectivity. Which
is why I said that, as a product of egocentric tension, Western civilization is
effectively no longer in operation, having been superseded by what stands above
it - the transcendental bias of post-egocentric man."
"Don't you really mean what stands
beneath it?" Peter Daniels protested defiantly.
"On the contrary, what stands beneath
it is the pre-egocentric, in which the balanced dualism to which you evidently
subscribe hadn't yet come properly into existence," Matthew retorted,
"the reason being that, at that stage in his evolution, Western man was
distinctly biased on the side of the subconscious and thus given to an art form
which reflected his sensual predominance and correlative predilection for the
illusory. But modern art generally
reflects the opposite tendency and, consequently, is of a far superior
nature. At its best, its most abstract,
it tends to reflect a superior development to both the religious and secular
art of the representational past, which is either sensuously lopsided or
balanced between the sensual and spiritual realms in what amounts to an
egocentric compromise. A spiritualized
abstract canvas is closer to truth, whereas a beautiful representational one,
particularly such as was produced during the cultural heyday of Western
civilization, contains a great deal of illusion - namely the thing or person or
whatever being represented, and the way in which the subject-matter is
handled. Now if these days we, or at
least the more spiritually evolved of us, prefer the sight of an abstract or
monochromatic canvas to a fully representational one, it's largely because
we've lost our taste and capacity for illusion, having evolved to a point which
is so biased in favour of the superconscious ... that
only what intimates of or reflects truth has any real relevance to us. The other, though still intelligible, becomes
something of an anachronism for us."
Peter Daniels grunted his animal
disapproval of this radical statement.
"Not for me it doesn't," he grimly declared. "I take no pleasure in abstract or
monochromatic canvases. And neither, I
should imagine, does anyone with the least degree of sense, taste, or
intelligence!"
"I'm bound to say that's a highly
presumptuous claim," Matthew averred, giving way to a degree of emotional
contempt for the journalist. "The
fact is that the most enlightened people tend to relate more to modern
non-representational art than to any traditional art, great or otherwise."
A smile of undisguised satisfaction passed
across Linda Daniels' attractively oval face at this remark, whereas Gwen's
remained rather stern. The former felt
secretly gratified by it, whereas the latter, conscious of her inability to
understand most of Matthew's art, took it as a personal affront.
"Even where monochromatic canvases are
concerned?" said Peter Daniels sarcastically.
"Yes, though it's not necessary to dwell
on extremes or to equate the bulk of modern art with such radical
experiments," Matthew objected.
"There's a lot more to it than that, as I think you would realize
if you visited any large gallery of modern art or glanced through the pages of
any comprehensively illustrated encyclopaedia on the subject. Even my work, at present focusing on certain
religious ideals, with particular reference to the inner light of meditation,
is not without a degree of variety."
"Humph, of a rather simplistic order I
should imagine!" the journalist sneered, to the evident disapproval of his
wife, who immediately reproved him with a curt, emphatic utterance of his
Christian name.
But Matthew remained unperturbed. "As a matter of fact, my work is
generally rather simplistic," he confessed. "For it wouldn't serve my illustrative
purposes to make it otherwise. My basic
adherence to what are termed minimalist techniques is a reflection, in large
measure, of fidelity to the superconscious as opposed
to the ego. Or, to be more precise, of
fidelity to an ego which is more under the sway of the superconscious
than of the subconscious, and accordingly less given to egocentric
embellishments and self-aggrandizing complexities than would otherwise be the
case."
"Bah! that's only to say you'd be
incapable of producing great art, which of necessity demands a high
level of complexity," Peter Daniels exclaimed.
"Yes, I dare say I am incapable
of producing the kind of art that appertains to the egocentric past,"
Matthew admitted, anticipating some such objection on the journalist's part,
"but that's exactly as it should be.
For I live in an intensely artificial environment and am the recipient
of post-egocentric standards and predilections.
I'm very much a product of the big city and therefore don't feel
qualified to paint or sculpt in a manner which, strictly speaking, pertains
chiefly to a medium-sized town or a small city, where nature and, needless to
say, nature's sensuous influence are never very far away, and man is accordingly
more under the dominion of his subconscious, with its penchant for the
illusory. No, if I were able and
qualified to paint in a style approximating to the representational tradition,
I'd be an anachronism, not a bona fide contemporary
artist."
Peter Daniels snorted contemptuously at
what seemed to him like a narrowly one-sided viewpoint. "And you regard what you do paint as
art rather than anti-art?" he asked sceptically.
"Yes, most certainly!" Matthew
replied. "Only, it's an art centred
on truth rather than balanced between truth and illusion, essence and
appearance, the subjective and the objective.
In short, a sort of superart.... However, the
fact that there has been an outpouring of anti-art this century is something I won't,
of course, deny. Yet even that was
partly founded on the delusion that art is essentially a matter of illusion,
like religion, rather than a phenomenon which evolves into truth, as in fact it
can do and subsequently has done. No, I don't concentrate on anti-art, any more
than on the negativity of Spenglerian pessimism
concerning the West, because I prefer to take a positive line and thus accept
the applicability of truth to art, whether in the realm of the spiritual or the
secular, the transcendent or the mundane.
To me, art isn't simply something that comes to an end with the passing
of an egocentric age, in which myth and sensuality play a significant part, but
something that continues on up the ladder of human evolution to the reflection
of a transcendental age, in which truth and spirituality are the leading
factors. Why therefore should I waste
time producing anti-art - which, in any case, has already been produced in
sufficient abundance this century, and seems primarily intended to belittle and
undermine the old representational mode of art - when there's a new art-sense
to consider and much work to be done in consolidating and perfecting it? Gone are the days when it was respectable or,
at any rate, credible to be an anti-artist.
If I knew anyone who was one these days, I shouldn't wish to associate
with him. He'd only bore and confuse
me."
"Which is precisely what you do to
me!" snapped Peter Daniels, to the verbal disapproval, once again, of his
wife. "Whether or not it's because
I was born and bred in the country, I don't know. But, whatever the reason, I can't relate to
what you're saying. As a conservative, I
find a great deal of modern art, of whatever tendency, totally unacceptable and
completely without justification. It
palls to insignificance by comparison with the greatest art produced by
European civilization right up to the mid-nineteenth century, which seems to be
the turning-point, the beginning of the rot, the gradual decline in our
significance as a cultural power. One
need only read a work like The Hour of Decision by Oswald Spengler, to obtain a fair idea of what is happening to us
and why we're in decline, not only as regards the arts but ..."
"Fortunately I have no use for
neo-royalist solutions to the apparent dilemma which confronts us,"
Matthew interposed, on the crest of another wave of contempt which had built-up
inside him at the mention of Spengler again. "And no sympathy for the book to which
you refer, which, in my honest opinion, is one of the most depressing, if not
reactionary, works ever written."
Peter Daniels flinched sharply, as though
from a sudden blow to the face. "I
can hardly agree with that statement!" he ejaculated,
patently shocked and offended.
"Oh, so you're a neo-royalist, are
you?" Matthew deduced.
"No, damn it, a conservative, as I
told you a moment ago!"
"Ah yes, a democratic royalist,"
the artist concluded inferentially.
There was a period of strained silence
before, with an obvious air of constraint, Peter Daniels confessed: "I'm
afraid I don't quite follow you."
"It simply means that you're not as
extreme as your authoritarian counterparts," Matthew calmly remarked. "As a royalist, you can only be one of
three principal types, viz. a genuine royalist, a democratic royalist, or a
neo-royalist."
"I fail to appreciate the distinction
between a genuine royalist and a neo-royalist," said Peter Daniels with a
thinly ironic smile on his lips.
"So do a lot of people," Matthew
retorted, "but that's only because they're ignorant."
"How dare you!" The journalist had got to his feet and was
staring down at Matthew in a highly threatening manner, his fists tightly
clenched at his sides.
"Peter!" Linda Daniels had also got to her feet and
put a restraining hand on her husband's nearest arm. "Are you going to behave reasonably, or
must we leave the room?"
"It would be better if we left this
place altogether," rasped Peter Daniels, still staring down at the seated
artist.
"Please, I'd rather you didn't,"
pleaded Gwen, stepping up to his other side.
"I have some dinner on at the moment, after all."
The mention of dinner appeared to calm
Peter Daniels down a little and induced him to return to his seat, accompanied
by the faithful and ever-persevering presence of his wife. Gwen sighed her relief and excused herself on
the pretext of having to return to the kitchen.
There was an uneasy silence in the room, disturbed only by the heavy
ticking of an old-fashioned wall clock.
It was Matthew, however, who first broke it or, rather, broke out of it.
"I didn't intend to offend you
personally," he averred, speaking directly to the journalist, "but
was simply trying to point out a fact.
And if you're still interested in hearing my notion, erroneous or not,
of the distinction between royalism and a neo-royalism, I'll give it to you."
Peter Daniels emitted a fulsome sigh of
regret. "Very well, what is
it?" he rasped.
"Essentially the difference between a
Henry VIII or a Louis XIV and a Franco or a Mussolini," replied Matthew,
blushing slightly in response to what he basically knew to be an unorthodox
viewpoint, but one which circumstances had launched him into without proper
preparation or indeed complete conviction.
"The difference, in other words, between a genuine aristocratic
dictatorship and a dictatorship which is anything but aristocratic. Genuine royalism
pertains to an epoch in which the aristocracy govern, an epoch preceding the
bourgeois one of royalist/socialist compromise.
Neo-royalism, or fascism, is only possible in
an age like our own, which is in transition to a proletarian one and
consequently subject to confusions and extreme reactionary tendencies. It's a species of authoritarianism which may
triumph for a time but never for very long, since the current of evolution is
against it and, in the end, it must succumb to the prevailing Zeitgeist,
which, especially these days, is decidedly socialistic. Not being a genuine article but a bogus,
anachronistic, plebeianized form of royalism, it is doomed to extinction and failure, even if,
for a while, it has the appearance of strength.
No, the legitimate epoch for royalism is one
in which man hasn't yet attained to a balance between the subconscious and superconscious minds but is under the dominion of the
former, and thus given to the perpetuation of a society which upholds the
sovereignty of the sensual and materialistic over the spiritual and
idealistic. Royalism
is an elitist phenomenon, and therefore it emphasizes differences between men,
as between the nobility and the commonality.
It is fundamentally dark, cruel, evil, illusory - in a word, pagan. And its upholders are generally men of
action, which, in any case, is what every genuine aristocracy should be. Only after they've been dethroned by the
bourgeoisie do the aristocracy - or such of them as are left - begin to
cultivate a more studious and contemplative mode of life. Yet the more they feel obliged to do this,
the less genuinely aristocratic they become, with a result that, after
centuries of progressive atrophying of the truly aristocratic instincts, one
arrives at the equivalent of the poor wretch whom Huysmans
delineates in his classic novel Against Nature through the character of
Des Esseintes - a sickly dilettante and dandy, the
degenerate consequence of bourgeois rule.
Of that race of proud and ruthless predators from which he was
descended, scarcely a trace remains. The
fact is you can't be a genuine aristocrat, and hence royalist, after the
termination of your governing epoch. You
become progressively spurious to the point where, if you have any fight left in
you, you may well be prepared to clutch at any fascist straw which the wind of
reactionary conservatism may blow your way."
"Well, fortunately for me, I happen to
be middle class," Daniels responded, "so I can't pretend it bothers
me all that much if the aristocracy are not what they used to be. And my politics are neither royalist nor
neo-royalist and/or fascist, as you define it, but conservative."
"Yes, democratic royalist,"
Matthew repeated, "because the bourgeois is ever a compromise animal,
indisposed to the authoritarian.
Appertaining to the middle, or second, stage of human evolution in
between the aristocracy and the proletariat, you divide into two main camps -
one camp with closer ties to the dethroned aristocracy, the other with closer
ties to the ascending proletariat. Thus
arises the prolonged parliamentary struggle between the right-wing conservative
bourgeoisie and their left-wing liberal counterparts, with the former growing
steadily weaker as the latter grow stronger, the political pendulum gradually
swinging from the Right to the Left, even given all the relatively minor
election oscillations coming in-between, as can be verified, I believe, by the
increasing radicalism which the parliamentary progression from Whig and Liberal
to Labour governments implies."
"Humph, you make it all sound too
philosophically neat and simple!" Peter Daniels objected.
"Maybe
that's because I happen to look down on it all from a higher
vantage-point," Matthew declared.
"What, democratic socialist?" the
journalist scoffed, turning briefly towards Linda Daniels for support.
"Totalitarian, if you please,"
came the instant rejoinder.
"What, you a communist?" Peter Daniels was almost on the verge of
getting to his feet again, so taken-aback was he by the artist's complacent
admission.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking,"
Matthew admitted, blushing slightly in spite of himself, for he was aware now
that part of what he said was not so much him speaking as an argumentative
persona which the debate had conjured up from the nether depths of his psyche
like some kind of demented demon of wilful intent. "Which is to say, to the extent,"
he rejoined, "that I perceive totalitarian socialism as a means to social
democracy and thus to the achievement of real political power by the
proletariat."
"But you're an educated and
well-spoken man, you're not a proletarian!" Peter Daniels hotly protested,
exhaling what might have been dragon's breath towards his obdurate
interlocutor.
"As a matter of fact, whether I'm
educated and well-spoken or the converse has absolutely nothing to do with
it," Matthew rejoined, unmoved.
"The fact remains that I can understand the development of
evolution away from a royalist/socialist dualism towards what transcends it and
accordingly stands at the opposite pole to royalism,
being the dictatorship of the proletariat rather than of the aristocracy. Now whether or not I'm a genuine socialist is
another matter, seeing that, just as one cannot be a genuine royalist when the
aristocracy are no longer in power but have been superseded by the bourgeoisie,
so, it seems to me, one cannot be a genuine socialist when the proletariat have
not yet attained to power, through the agency of totalitarian socialism, but
are still subject to the control, no matter how tenuously, of the bourgeois
status quo, with its capitalist base.
Democratic socialists, on the other hand, are no closer to being genuine
socialists ... than democratic royalists, or conservatives, to being genuine royalists
or, rather, neo-royalists and, hence, fascists.
They are tainted by the bourgeois brush of dualistic compromise, they're
part of the parliamentary tension between royalism
and socialism and, as such, they pertain to a parliamentary epoch, even if and
when that epoch is drawing towards a close.
A genuine socialist, however, could only look down on them from the
idealistic vantage-point of one who has evolved beyond the middle, or twilight,
stage of the political spectrum, with its capitalist exploitation. Standing in the light of proletarian triumph,
he would not care for the relative darkness appertaining to the epoch of
bourgeois democracy. But I don't stand
in such a light, not even in the inceptive context of communist
authoritarianism, when the proletariat, having wrenched power from the
bourgeoisie through a revolutionary elite, have yet to come into their own
political maturity and are accordingly subject to the paternalistic control of
the Communist Party, like a child dependent on the guidance of a stern
parent. No, I simply realize that such a
light is one day destined to materialize, and that it's therefore impossible to
regard democratic socialism as an end-in-itself, with nothing higher above or
beyond it. Thanks to my knowledge and
insight, I'm obliged to live as an outsider, unable to commit myself to the
compromise integrity of democratic socialism, which is Welfare State socialism
coupled to state capitalism, but simultaneously unable to enter into the true
spirit of genuine socialism, and for the simple reason that such a spirit
doesn't yet exist, the proletariat not having officially come to power, since
still living under the economic heel of bourgeois capitalism."
Peter Daniels could hardly believe his
ears! It was as though the fact that he
found himself in close proximity to a man who belittled and contradicted all
his own views and standards was too much to take, too difficult to
comprehend. He had never been
politically face-to-face with 'the enemy' before, with a person so
unequivocally and radically left wing, and now it appeared that he was in fact
face-to-face with such a person he found it strangely unreal, as though he were
simply the hapless victim of a bad dream.
It was really quite different from what he had imagined it would be, and
largely because he was no longer as confident as before about the virtues of
parliamentary democracy. He almost felt
humiliated! And not only on account of
Matthew Pearce but, no less evidently, also on account his wife, who, although
sitting next to him, seemed spiritually far removed from him, drawn to the
substance of the artist's remarks, wrapped-up in an attentive silence which
somehow only served to emphasize the temperamental and ideological
incompatibility which he knew to exist between them but did his best to
minimize or ignore. There seemed to be a
conspiracy against him in the air.
But he would not be humiliated, least of
all by a frigging advocate of totalitarian socialism! His middle-class dignity rebelled against the
prospect. He would speak out, defend the
cause and reality of parliamentary freedom if it was the last thing he
did! And Matthew Pearce, socialist or no
socialist, would have to listen, irrespective of how abhorrent he found
it. Maybe there was a chance that he
could be reformed, made to see sense while the opportunity prevailed,
encouraged to grow up and put his wishful and largely over-simplistic thinking
behind him.
Thus Peter Daniels responded to the
challenge in the only way he knew how - with a wholehearted defence of
parliamentary democracy, a defence designed to remind Matthew Pearce that,
although such democracy was not without its faults, it was still a damn sight
better than the chaos and tyranny which inevitably accompanied socialist revolutions.
The artist listened patiently but, even
with a consciousness of his own ideological shortcomings, remained
unimpressed. He had heard such arguments
before, accompanied by the usual welter of platitudes concerning the virtues of
capitalist freedom and the superiority of liberal over totalitarian
systems. It was what one had to expect
from a bourgeois, that man of the compromise stage of evolution. To him, dictatorships of whatever description
were equally objectionable. And
why? Because they deprived him of his power,
took away his freedom to exploit as he thought fit. Royalist autocracies kept economic power in
the hands of the aristocracy. Communist
autocracies would share power amongst the proletariat once they came of age and
could be more democratically entrusted with its management themselves. No wonder he feared and hated them! Either way - with the possible exception of a
fascist regime partial to the monied interests of the
conservative bourgeoisie - a regression to feudalism or a progression to
socialism signalled the end of his capitalist power. Consequently he had no option but to uphold
the parliamentary system, that compromise of the bourgeois world. Four years of a democratic-socialist
government, with its state capitalism, would be easier or less hard to bear,
depending on one's viewpoint, than an indefinite period of totalitarian
socialism which, if it didn't do away with one as an individual, would almost
certainly put an end to one's economic exploitation. For after those four years had elapsed, there
was at least a chance, indeed a very good chance, a more than even chance, that
the party closer to his own heart and economic interests would be returned to
power, and matters accordingly take a turn for the better. It was a compromise worth putting-up with!
But not for any socialist, any genuine
socialist, that is. Oh, no! Such a person had no patience with the
government, intermittent or otherwise, of a party in the pay of, and thus
sympathetic to, the capitalistic interests of the bourgeoisie, particularly the
grand-bourgeoisie. He wanted their party
done away with, so that the road would be clear for socialism. And with the end of the democratic royalists
would come the demise of the democratic socialists who, although left wing,
were insufficiently extreme to function in the guise of genuine socialism. With the demise of parliamentary democracy,
an undiluted socialist party would prevail, to signal the beginnings of a new
era of political development in which, eventually, the proletariat would take
over from Big Daddy the economic, political, and judicial management of their
affairs. That was what every progressive
proletarian wanted to see and, unless a catastrophe of unimaginable horror or
disaster overtook the world in the near future, it would surely happen,
evolutionary progress continuing along the path opened-up by the growth of
urban civilization.
Yet it was impossible for Matthew to say
all this to Peter Daniels, who probably wouldn't have understood or appreciated
it. Instead, he contented himself with
words to the effect that he had no use or respect for the type of freedom, so
dear to the bourgeois heart, which enabled capitalist exploiters to amass
private fortunes at the proletariat's expense, growing ever more corrupt the
richer they became.
"Yes, but really," the journalist
rejoined, his voice strained with self-righteous emotion, "surely you must
realize that dictatorial regimes are essentially evil and cruel. I mean, just look at the examples the world
has seen this century, Stalin's most especially, not to mention those currently
still in existence."
"Of course, I strongly object to
fascist regimes," Matthew countered, "since they're against the grain
of evolution and a scourge to the most progressive people. When I think of the number of socialists
killed or tortured by Hitler's accomplices, my blood positively boils with
anger at the magnitude of the reactionary tyranny unleashed at the time. But there's one hell of a difference between
a neo-feudal regime and a socialist regime, and that's a fact which you
parliamentary people don't always appreciate.
You cite Stalin as an example of communist tyranny, and no-one would
doubt that Stalin was effectively a cold-blooded autocrat who ruled the Soviet
Union with a tyrannous hand. Yet Stalin
was still a progressive revolutionary and not a regressive reactionary, like
Hitler. He was virtually an angel
compared to Hitler, even if a somewhat fallen one."
"Oh, come now!" Peter Daniels
protested, becoming red in the face with suppressed rage. "I would hesitate to describe someone
responsible for the butchering of some twenty million people in quite such
euphemistic terms!"
"Yes, but one must remember that
Stalin was under a considerable amount of internal pressure from rival factions
and consequently felt obliged to take extremely stringent measures to safeguard
his regime," Matthew averred.
"As to the full facts of the matter, I'm not of course sufficiently
well-informed, since that is something for the historian or politician. But I do know that I'd rather hear about the
erection of concentration camps by a Stalin than by a Hitler, or any other
fascist dictator for that matter."
"Even with the murder of several
million people?" queried Peter Daniels incredulously.
"Even then."
"You mean you're not against the mass
murder of millions of innocent people?" gasped Peter Daniels, patently
astounded.
Matthew was about to reply in the negative,
but then wisely hesitated on the verge of speaking. No, he wasn't going to be duped by bourgeois
humanism. "As to the mass murder of
millions of innocent people, I would most certainly object, and in the
strongest possible terms!" he averred.
"But not to the liquidation - an altogether more pertinent term -
of millions of guilty people, or people, in other words, whom it's
necessary for one to remove in order to further and safeguard the new
society. I strongly object to the
indiscriminate murder of millions of innocent people, such as was sanctioned by
Hitler's regime on chiefly racial grounds.
For such cold-blooded genocide is patently criminal. It leads to the elimination of millions of
the best as well as the worst, socialists as well as capitalists, the oppressed
as well as their class oppressors. It
doesn't hit the nail on the head, so to speak, and these days more than ever
it's precisely the head which needs hitting - namely the bourgeois one!"
"You mean you wouldn't object to a
purge of the bourgeoisie by any prospective socialist regime which came to
power in the near future?" exclaimed Peter Daniels, his strained
tone-of-voice indicating a mixture of horror and accusation.
"No, of course not!" Matthew
admitted. "For it's pretty obvious
that the bourgeoisie would be somewhat incompatible with the socialistic
requirements of such a regime. They
would be far from enthusiastic about sacrificing their competitiveness for the
sake of a uniformly co-operative framework within the context of public
ownership, and for the simple reason that such a sacrifice would run contrary
to their material interests as capitalist exploiters and free-market
predators. One couldn't expect them to
suddenly become proletarians, as though by the wave of a magic wand. You can't simply slip out of one soul and
into another, out of a private domain which has done a Faustian pact with the
Devil and into a public one which repudiates any such pact. No, they'd have to be interned, and not
simply because they were adjudged incompatible with the socialistic
requirements of a truly co-operative society, but also as retribution for their
capitalist crimes and exploitative past.
The proletariat would have to be avenged on their historical
oppressors!"
"And who exactly would those
oppressors be?" Peter Daniels wanted to know, a mildly ironic humour
replacing his previous sombre response to the artist's apocalyptic
revelations. For it was as though the
tragedy of what he had just heard had suddenly been transmuted into farce,
albeit of a slightly sinister order. He
wasn't prepared to accept the guilt of the bourgeoisie, since bourgeois blood
ran in his veins. He knew that,
historically, the bourgeoisie were justified, even if he wasn't prepared to
admit to the fact that their justification was transitory.
"Obviously a great number of them
would be businessmen," Matthew obliged, after a few seconds thoughtful
deliberation during which time he cleared his throat with guttural relish, as
though in preparation for an arduous task.
"And, most especially, those businessmen, in particular, who had
oppressed the workers the most and reaped the biggest dividends from the
capitalist system. The largest sharks
above all! But also a number of smaller
ones, staunch believers in free enterprise, i.e. the right of private
entrepreneurs to pursue their capitalist interests irrespective of the moral
and spiritual cost to society in general, and with a view to becoming rich and
powerful, like their more successful exemplars.
Then, of course, a number of professionals, including private doctors,
private dentists, and public-school teachers - in short, those professionals
who weren't salaried employees of the State but distinctly independent. And, needless to say, fascists and
conservative politicians, artists and writers of a reactionary or conservative
turn-of-mind, royals and peers, reactionary priests, especially those who had
belonged to the Established Church and thus recognized the monarch as head of
the Church - a thing which no genuine Christian would ever do, since alpha and
omega, power and peace, are quite incommensurate, and the Church is supposed to
be on the side of ecclesiastic truth and not, as would appear to be the case
with the Church of England, on the side of monarchic strength! Such a paradoxical Church, which has the
embodiment of autocratic power as its head and a long tradition of invasive
imperialism behind it, could only be incompatible with socialist
requirements."
"I see," sighed Peter Daniels,
following a short but anguished pause during which he mopped his brow with a
linen handkerchief. "And presumably
this hypothetical socialist regime would liquidate, if that's the correct word,
journalists like myself, who profess to distinctly conservative
viewpoints."
"Naturally," Matthew
rejoined. "It would intern anyone who
was in any way opposed to its policies of socialist progress and either
incapable of or unwilling to contemplate reform."
"Well, thank goodness it doesn't exist
at present, and that a certain amount of sanity and decency still prevail in
the world, especially the Western half of it!" cried Peter Daniels
triumphantly. "I very much doubt
that such a godforsaken regime will ever exist, and not only because we, the
right-thinking individuals of society, wouldn't allow it to, but, no less
probably, because the catastrophe that would most likely precipitate such a
horrible state-of-affairs - namely a third world war - would more than likely
result in the wholesale destruction of life on this planet and consequently in
the elimination of all political parties, whether
Right, Left, or Centre, moderate or extreme, and not in what I suspect you
would hope to be a socialist victory!"
"Oh, let's not drag Armageddon into
it!" protested Linda Daniels, breaking the long silence she had patiently
kept while the two men waged their own verbal war in front of her - an
ideological one which she had tactfully preferred to keep out of. "A third world war would be too
unspeakably vile, too unspeakably horrendous!
Let's hope it will never come about, and that some sense and decency
will accordingly continue to prevail. We
want life, not death!"
As though that were a signal for a fresh
beginning, Gwen suddenly returned to the room and announced, rather to
everyone's relief, that dinner was ready.
Accordingly, Matthew followed the others out through the open door and
into the dining-room across the hallway.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Consisting
of roast lamb and assorted vegetables, diner provided a slight reprieve from
the ideological tension and mutual antipathy which had sprung-up between the
two men in the lounge. But only, alas, a
slight one! Although their conversation
was somewhat muted by preoccupation with food, the close proximity into which
they had been thrown by the relatively small circular table at which they were
sitting caused them to feel psychologically uncomfortable, especially Peter
Daniels, who felt the physical closeness to his ideological rival as a kind of
humiliation and personal betrayal. But
for the women, he would have got up from the table and sat himself down, plate
in hand, on one of the spare chairs the far side of the dining-room (which in
any case wasn't a particularly large room), in order to be delivered, in some
degree, from the oppression of social intimacy with his political enemy. Indeed, he would have refused to eat dinner
altogether! But, of course, such a
refusal would hardly have pleased his hostess, who had put so much effort into
getting it ready, and so he was obliged to resign himself, like Matthew, to the
rather trying situation which circumstances had forced upon him. Taking refuge, as far as possible, in the
meal itself was the only solution, it seemed, to present itself to either man's
imagination.
Yet the women, though scarcely on the best
of terms with each other, were not prepared to allow the occasion to sink into
a boorish silence, interrupted only by the mundane sound of chewing and
swallowing, but made an effort to lift it above the merely bestial level by
indulging in a little sporadic conversation, Gwen especially doing her best to
raise the atmosphere slightly, her sociability doubtless owing something to the
fact that she had not been present throughout the greater part of the
male-dominated conversation in the adjoining room.
Nor altogether surprisingly, the principal
subject of their conversation was the new school term and the likelihood of
their having to work harder then than during the previous one, which, despite
the summer exams, seemed to them more like an anti-climax to the year. Linda Daniels, in particular, was especially
anxious to improve the quality of her teaching next term, since she felt that
it had somehow suffered from her generally poor health in recent months, while
Gwen, though not over-complacent about her own past teaching record, was
confident that her talents would stand the test of time and be adequately
rewarded when the next batch of examination results were due, come Christmas.
The men listened in solemn silence, rather
bored by the topic under discussion yet secretly grateful, all the same, for
something external to cling-on to and relieve them, slightly, from the
psychological pressure of their mutual antipathy. Matthew might have questioned Linda Daniels
about her teaching of physical education had he not been constrained to silence
by the brooding presence of her husband, who seemed equally disinclined to ask
questions of Gwen. All in all, dinner
transpired to be more of an ordeal than a pleasure and, when it was over, both
men were relieved to drift as far apart as possible, even if this meant they
were obliged to enter into conversation with the women instead.
However, it wasn't about school life that
Matthew talked, as he found himself being escorted back towards the lounge by
Mr Daniels' attractive and curiously-interested wife, but about art and, in
particular, his art, upon which he proceeded to enlarge to the extent that
circumstances would permit. It was
evident that the women were determined to prevent a repeat performance of the
bourgeois/proletarian antagonism by keeping the men apart (not that they had
any desire to remain together!), Gwen likewise having battened-on to Peter
Daniels' arm and escorted him in the opposite direction from Matthew, so that
they would be out of harm's reach.
To be sure, this arrangement soon proved to
the mutual satisfaction of both parties.
For it wasn't long before, warming to Linda's curiosity and spurred-on
by the wine he had dispatched at table, Matthew forgot about his antipathy
towards her husband and immersed himself in the subject to-hand - one that was
always most dear to him, since the focal-point of his life's endeavour. He explained how he was striving to make his
art more transcendental by using minimalist techniques and exploiting the
application of synthetics, like acrylic, nylon, and plastic, in order to
divorce it still further from natural origins or influences.
Linda listened attentively. She recalled what he had said earlier, about
the synthetic nature of his art, and inquired a little more deeply into some of
the subjects he had touched upon - namely, the fact of the superconscious
and its relation to the inner light. She
was also curious to learn who his chief influences were, who he particularly
admired.
Matthew deliberated with himself a moment,
as though the answer to this question required a meticulous mental sifting
through dozens of possible names, before replying: "Of the painters, I
think probably Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian have had the greatest influence on my development,
especially the latter, whose Neo-Plasticism I
particularly admire. He was very
spiritual, you know. Very committed to
reflecting the effects of urban environments on the psyche, to making his work
as internal and abstract as possible.
And, of course, he was a mystic to boot - a theosophist. From the modern viewpoint, a tremendously
significant and important artist! Not
one of your anti-science and anti-technology types, by any means. Nor a traitor to evolution and bourgeois
apologist, like certain other so-called modern artists. Very much a believer in the big city and its
spiritualizing effects upon our lives.
Very much an artistic leader."
"Yes, I do know a thing or two about
him actually," Linda revealed, smiling appreciatively. "He painted a work entitled Broadway
Boogie-Woogie, didn't he?"
"Correct. One of his most complex and famous works,
paying due tribute to New York, the city he admired above all others,"
Matthew confirmed.
"And what about Ben Nicholson?"
she asked, anxious to keep the conversation on the same rails. "How did he influence you?"
"Well, in pretty much the same
way," the artist replied, "that's to say, by being so
transcendentally abstract and pertinent to the times. I particularly admire his relief work,
especially the more formalized and geometrically congruous examples of it
constructed largely in the 'thirties; though it has had less overall influence
on me than his minimalist still-lives, which were to set the tone, to some
extent, of my meditating figures, in which only the bare outlines, executed in
acrylic on a monochromatic ground, are allowed to emerge. That gives them a kind of transparency which
emphasizes the spiritual over the material, you see. Makes them pertinent to the superconscious and therefore to transcendentalism. If I were more egocentric, on the other hand,
I would undoubtedly have filled them in with various corporeal elaborations and
embellishments, so they'd look more like traditional portraits of seated
figures. But such a procedure wouldn't
really have established me as a modern artist, or enabled me to consider myself
one of the spiritual antennae of the race.
It would simply have shown that I was backward, lagging behind the
times, and therefore not entitled to consider myself a genuine artist. For such an artist is less a person who can
paint well or elaborately, displaying all manner of complex techniques, than a
person who is relevant to the age and best capable of illustrating the nature
of that age.... Which is why, in my opinion, an artist like Ben Nicholson is
greater than, say, Stanley Spencer, who, though possessing a technical facility
that suggests true greatness, lacks real relevance and is effectively
anachronistic. At times, you would
hardly think he lived in the twentieth century, especially where his Christ at Cookham works are concerned. Yet there could be no doubt in your mind that
Ben Nicholson did. For most of his work
is appropriately abstract and therefore indicative of a society biased towards
the superconscious.
Thus, bearing in mind the criterion of relevance, one can only conclude
Nicholson to be the greater artist.
Indeed, I'm inclined to regard him as the finest British artist this
century, bearing in mind his sustained commitment to transcendentalism."
"Even finer than Graham
Sutherland?" Linda queried.
"Certainly more consistently abstract
than Sutherland," Matthew opined, "which isn't to say that the
latter's work is relatively inconsequential.
On the contrary, I'd place it above Stanley Spencer's any day. Yet, unlike Nicholson's best work, it strikes
me as mainly being a kind of secular art, a machine art which brings to mind
strong connotations with works by Matta, Tanguy, Wyndham Lewis, and even that arch-surrealist writer
Raymond Roussel, with his elaborate contraption in Locus Solus for making a mosaic out of hundreds of
teeth."
"I'm afraid you've gone a little out
of my depth," Linda confessed, feeling slightly puzzled. "I know there's a kind of jaggedness to
some of Sutherland's works, if that's what you mean."
"Yes, at times a rather fearsome
jaggedness," Matthew confirmed, smiling weakly. "Which fact doubtless owed something to
his experiences as a war artist, a recorder of the frightful destruction which
assailed London during the Blitz. But,
even then, his work is largely abstract, and that's the important
thing! It couldn't have been done by a
nineteenth-century painter, not even Turner.
And it doesn't necessarily imply horror and disgust with modern life,
like so much Expressionist work. Indeed,
you can judge whether art is good or bad not simply in terms of relevance to
the age but also - and no less importantly - in terms of whether it accepts and
encourages progress or, alternatively, rebels against it, mistaking progress
for regress."
"How d'you
mean?" Linda asked, with a puzzled look on her pretty face.
"Well, I mean whatever rebels against
the rise of technology and science, the expansion of the city, and other
related phenomena, considering such developments pernicious to the welfare of
mankind, is essentially bad art," Matthew responded almost
matter-of-factly. "For it misleads
people by giving them the impression that things are either worse than or not
as good as they really are; that instead of progressing, we're indulging in a
kind of suicidal regression which it's in the interests of art to point out
and, if possible, correct and/or stem - assuming it were still possible for
people to respond to it in terms of a desire to correct and/or stem. I mean, there's inevitably a point at which
such pessimistic art becomes merely fatalistic, with no other motive than to
record the degree of that fatality, in relation to society, as the artist
perceives it. Perhaps it's mostly like
that? I don't know. But one thing I am sure of is
that such art is bad, because it has turned against the age rather than
accepted it, and accordingly refused to see the changes which have come about
as manifestations of evolutionary progress.
One gets the impression that the artists concerned are either too stupid
to recognize progress when they see it or, alternatively, are bourgeois
apologists, hirelings of a reactionary establishment who regret the decay of
traditional, egocentric values. Whatever
the case - and they may even be both - their art isn't what I would regard as a
reflection of the age but, rather, a distortion and denigration of it, and
that's bad! It can cause a lot of
confusion in people's minds, and not only directly, by attacking the modern
world, but indirectly, by turning away from it.
A truly great artist, however, can only be loyal and relevant to the
age, not reactionary or anachronistic.
He doesn't seek oblivion in some imaginary Golden Age of the past, or
endeavour to resurrect certain aristocratic values long after they've ceased to
have any applicability to the times, but forges ahead, content in the
knowledge, like Mondrian, that life is gradually
changing for the better, remaining faithful, again like Mondrian,
to the exigencies of evolution, and not either stagnating in a stasis of
perpetual dualism or reverting to a context of pre-dualistic sensual and
material one-sidedness. The true artist
is ever the advocate of his age, not a rebel against it! And if the age demands that art becomes a
reflection of truth rather than a propagator of truthful illusions or illusory
truths, well then, truthful his art must be, no matter how anti-traditional it
may appear to the philistines!
"The representative art of the past
hundred years, including that of the novel," he went on, growing in
confidence, "testifies to the mounting influence of the superconscious at the expense of the subconscious. It aims at truth and light, not their
negation. In literature it takes the
form of Flaubert and Zola rather than Huysmans or
Wilde. It adopts a scientific detachment,
an impersonality and impartiality towards the facts under surveillance. That humility and painstaking patience before
the phenomena of existence which is the hallmark of the true scientific temper
- what is that if not a reflection of our mounting allegiance to the superconscious at the expense of mere egotistical
self-indulgence? Was it something that
Descartes or Leibniz really understood?
No, they lived in an egocentric age which was as much governed by
illusion as by truth. They wouldn't have
understood the patience and self-effacing intellectual humility of a Pasteur or
a Darwin. Still less would they have
approved of the literature of Flaubert or Zola or any of the other great
moderns. Admittedly, they might have
approved of Tolkien in some measure, but that's only
because he was one of the most unequivocally illusory writers who ever lived,
an exponent of bad art, or art that defies the transcendental preoccupation
with truth which characterizes our age and propagates a species of illusion
which stands out like a literary sore thumb in the march of evolutionary
progress! Just as politics has its Hitlers, so literature has its Tolkiens. It also has its D.H. Lawrences
and John Cowper Powyses. But that, I think, is really quite another
story!"
"In what way?" Linda eagerly
wanted to know, becoming puzzled.
"Oh, in a variety of ways
actually," Matthew rejoined, pulling a wry face as though to indicate his
distaste for the subject. "I mean,
from the viewpoint of relevance to the age, D.H. Lawrence was a very bad
artist, a deplorable novelist. His
rebellion against science and technology, post-Christian transcendentalism, the
city, and so on, was thoroughly misguided and unenlightened, eventually leading
him to a kind of neo-pagan acceptance of nature and belief in sex as a mode,
nay, the principal mode of salvation, like Wilhelm Reich, his rather more
sophisticated German counterpart.
Whether in regard to The Plumed Serpent or Lady
Chatterley's Lover or, indeed, half-a-dozen other novels, one is led to the
conclusion that he was one of the most reactionary and worldly writers of his
time. The very fact that he ended-up
virtually worshipping the 'dark gods of the loins', or whatever it was, speaks
for itself. Instead of being among the
ideological antennae of the race, as a genuine artist should be, D.H. Lawrence
became a kind of tail to it, a down-dragging influence who related to
pre-dualistic criteria, as germane to a pagan age, in which the senses
predominate, under the auspices of subconsciousness,
in response to the sensuous presence of untrammelled nature. One could hardly be more anti-modern than
him, not even if one were intent upon propagating a philosophy of
nature-worship, or Elementalism, like John Cowper
Powys, who, to judge from his elementary books, wasn't the most genuine of
artists either!"
"Wasn't he the one who wrote In Defence
of Sensuality?" Linda
tentatively commented, recalling to mind the only J.C. Powys title she knew.
"So I recall," Matthew admitted,
a faintly ironic smile appearing on his thin lips in response to Linda's
prompting. "Hardly the kind of book
to have appealed to someone like Mondrian, who was
truly modern. But Powys was essentially
a bourgeois anachronism with a strong admiration for people like Rousseau and
Wordsworth, and consequently much of what he wrote is irrelevant or contrary to
the trend of evolution, including his paradoxical belief in a two-faced First
Cause, which he would have us all ambiguously responding to in an appropriately
grateful or defiant manner, depending on our circumstances at any given
time! Not quite the religious viewpoint
that Aldous Huxley grew to endorse, is it? But, then, artists of Huxley's calibre are
few-and-far-between anyway, so one can't be particularly surprised!
"For every genuine and truly modern
artist," Matthew continued, unconsciously slipping into a terminology more
congenial to himself, "there seems to be at least a dozen sham ones - men
who lack both the nerve and the ability to come properly to terms with their
age. Powys and Lawrence are simply two
of the more conspicuous examples of bad artists, and not simply because of what they wrote
but also in terms of how they wrote. I mean, the most significant
twentieth-century novels aren't those which tell a story, and thus promulgate
fictions in one context or another, but those which are overtly
autobiographical and/or philosophical, and thereby attest to the swing of the
literary pendulum from illusion towards truth.
To produce fictions, in this day and age, is contrary to the dictates of
transcendentalism and liable to result in one's being branded an
anachronism. A novelist who gives us
something approximating to traditional literature, with plot, characterization,
long descriptive passages, narrative, and so forth, is equivalent to a painter
who produces representational canvases, or a composer whose music is tonal and
harmonic, or a sculptor whose sculptures are figurative. He isn't truly contemporary, for his head is
full of traditional criteria and it's precisely those criteria which, in their
classical objectivity, are no longer relevant.
By not relating to the foremost developments of the age he reduces
himself to the level of an anachronistic dilettante, and consequently whatever
he does is of little evolutionary import.
His storytelling, accomplished or otherwise, will simply make for bad
art or, rather, for no art at all, insofar as former criteria of literature no
longer apply - except, that is, in the popular context, where they both intimate
of cinema and to some extent serve the insatiable hunger of the film industry
for narrative productions. As a victim
of atavistic inheritance or historic class-fixation, his work will simply be
out-of-place. It may be as good as if
not better than novels used to be when the canons of illusion applied. But that won't alter its irrelevance to the
present by one jot! At best, one can
congratulate him for his ability to emulate past masters, his antiquarian
capacities, but hardly anything else - least of all his refusal or inability to
satisfy the demands of contemporary art!
For, these days, the artist is very much, to repeat, a man of inner
truth and light, not their objective negation!"
"Which is presumably what you
are?" Linda concluded sympathetically.
"I hope so," said Matthew,
blushing. "At least I try to be
such as much as possible, though only, of course, within the spheres of
painting and sculpture, which are my principal concerns. As to literature, I don't apply myself, since
unable to practise three professions simultaneously. But I had a friend who was a novelist and a
very progressive one, too! He used to
write more philosophically than autobiographically, but he also experimented
with a variety of radical techniques, including a species of verbal abstraction
which aimed at depriving his work of intelligibility."
"How d'you
mean?" Linda queried, not altogether unreasonably in the circumstances.
Matthew hesitated a moment before
replying. For he was obliged to stifle a
degree of amusement at his late-friend's expense. "Well, he wanted some of his writings to
directly parallel, so far as possible, the development of abstraction in
painting and music, since he believed that, due to commercial pressures,
literature had fallen behind the other arts in this respect," the artist
at length responded. "For instance,
he would write sentences like 'This munching got or placing use cat to their
run taken over shoes,' or something of the sort. I can't remember his exact verbal
constructions but, anyway, words were arranged in such fashion as to avoid all
sense or, at any rate, as much sense as possible."
Linda had to giggle at the mention of this,
which sounded somehow crazy to her.
"You mean to say he used a kind of automatic writing technique!"
she doubtfully exclaimed.
"No, since he often deliberated over
his choice of words for hours on-end," Matthew revealed. "After all, when you write automatically
you still find yourself making some kind of sense here and there. Familiar words and phrases hang
together. But he wanted to reduce
meaning as much as possible in order to be thoroughly abstract, and this he
systematically endeavoured to do, though mostly in short poems, which were
really Mallarmé ten or twenty times over, so to
speak. Not the sort of thing that would
have appealed to Tolstoy, who failed even to make any sense of Mallarmé, but arguably compatible with a kind of
avant-garde abstraction which the French poet seems to have anticipated. Anyway, before his death - he was killed in a
road crash early last year - my late-friend was working on what he called an
avant-garde supernovel, using this abstract technique
of his, which he regarded as more radical than anything James Joyce or William
Burroughs had ever done. Had he lived to
finish the work, I'm confident it would have been the most revolutionary
example of literary abstraction ever penned or, rather, typed. Yet such wasn't to be the case, and, so far
as I know, the world still awaits a novel which purports to make as little
sense as possible."
"Maybe that's just as well!"
Linda commented, offering Matthew a wry smile.
"Well, however nonsensical the idea
may seem," he rejoined, "it has a certain contemporary relevance,
insofar as similar if less radical experiments have already
been made. Yet, in a way, the idea of
breaking-up meaningful language is no less significant than breaking-up or
transcending representational form in art or diatonic melody in music, and
corresponds to the same post-egocentric urge.
I, for one, wouldn't be at all surprised if we abandoned language
altogether, in the future, and resorted to pure awareness and non-verbal
contemplation as a means to enlightenment.
After all, if early man, grovelling in the dirt of prehistoric survival,
was beneath language, not having evolved to a civilized framework, why
shouldn't late man be above it, having evolved beyond such a framework and,
thanks to his mastery of the machine, entered a non-verbal epoch primarily
dedicated to the attainment of spiritual salvation. It seems a perfectly credible contention to
me, at any rate. And I'm convinced it
would have seemed no less credible to Aldous Huxley,
who was an advocate of pure contemplation, or 'cleansing the doors of
perception' through the removal of verbal distractions. For the trend of evolution is certainly in
the direction of spiritual salvation, as our growing allegiance to the inner
light adequately attests, and, as such, it's to our advantage to transcend the
constraints of language in due course, since it has no relevance to 'the peace
that surpasses all understanding', i.e. intellectuality."
"No, I guess not," Linda conceded
doubtfully. "Though it seems
unlikely that we'll outgrow our verbal preoccupations for some time yet, even
if certain avant-garde writers are anxious to break up language at
present."
"Oh, I quite agree," Matthew
admitted, smiling. "Yet that isn't
to say the attempts which are currently being made to transcend such
preoccupations are without justification or meaning. They're essentially symptomatic of a long,
slow process of de-verbalization upon which the modern world would seem to be
embarked, not arbitrary indulgences imposed upon society out of mere whim or in
consequence of a fad. They're bound to
have a significant influence upon our future development. For the more godlike we become, the less need
we'll have of language. If the beast is
beneath speech, then the god is very much above it. And modern man is closer to becoming godly
than to remaining beastly."
"Yes, though some modern men are
evidently less far removed from the beastly than others," Linda Daniels
averred, jerking her head back in the general direction of her husband, across
the far side of the room.
Matthew automatically smiled and nodded his
head in tacit confirmation of Linda's suggestion, which left him agreeably
surprised and even flattered. He hadn't
expected her to be quite so sympathetic to himself and contemptuous of her
husband, and was somewhat relieved to discover that his preconceptions about her,
in regard to Peter Daniels, had been proven inaccurate.
Indeed, judging by the interest she had
shown in his art, it was difficult not to conclude that Linda was a very
different type of person from her husband, much more culturally and temperamentally
akin to himself. He was certainly
intrigued by her and glad to have someone intelligent and sympathetic with whom
to talk for a change, someone who, unlike Gwen and even Mrs Evans, suggested a
wavelength similar to his own. And he
was well aware, as he sat opposite her, no more than three feet away, that she
was a more attractive woman than Gwen, not to mention Gwen's mother, who,
though far from unattractive, was probably a little past her prime.
Yes, he liked the look of her richly
plaited hair, dark-brown eyes, aquiline nose, and nobly shaped lips, which
suggested refined sensuality. He also
liked her dark-green satin minidress, which was eye-catchingly décolleté, and the ample
contours of her breasts, which were not without a certain seductive charm for
him. And then, too, her voice had a
pleasing resonance, a feminine depth and huskiness to it which was far from
devoid of sensual overtones. All things
considered (or, at any rate, as much of her as he could see), she struck him as
of superior physical quality to Gwen and much too good for the reactionary fool
to whom she was married.
He wondered how she had got herself hitched
to him in the first place, though he had no intention of asking her about it
while Peter Daniels was still in the flat, even if at a fairly safe distance
from them both, and with the suggestion of being too engaged in conversation
with Gwen to be in a position to overhear anything. Still, there was always the possibility that
he could find out in due course, say, through inviting her over to his flat or
studio one evening. After all, if she
was as interested in his art as she appeared to be, why not invite her over to
scrutinize it close-up, and thus have the opportunity to discuss art in more
congenial surroundings? Particularly
since, according to what he had already learnt about her, she was something of
an artist herself, with distinct leanings towards abstraction and the
avant-garde in general?
Yes, it would be refreshingly tonic to have
a kindred spirit to address, if not undress.
He was always on the lookout for understanding, and Linda Daniels, with
her attentive nature, seemed more than adequately qualified to provide it, even
if she was less of an artist than a schoolmistress. At least she had a progressive disposition,
which was more than could be said for a fair number of professional artists -
sculptors no less than painters. Yes, he
would definitely invite her over!
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Had a
busy day at the office?" Mrs Evans asked her husband, as he entered the
kitchen minus his bowler hat and leather briefcase.
"Not really," he replied, going
up to and giving her a perfunctory peck on the cheek, as per custom. "Pretty quiet, in the main." He briefly glanced round the kitchen, before
asking her what was for dinner?
"Boiled bacon, potatoes, and
carrots," she replied. "Can't
you smell it?"
"I've got a blocked nose
actually," he informed her.
"Must have caught another damn cold."
Mrs Evans made an effort to appear
sympathetic, but, privately, she was disgusted with him and fearful of catching
his germs. She'd had enough colds for
one year and didn't relish the prospect of catching yet another! Indeed, now that she had it in mind to send a
letter to Matthew Pearce, arranging to visit him again the following week, a
new cold was the last thing she wanted!
How would he feel if she went to him snivelling or all blocked-up with
her husband's stinking germs? Not
particularly amorous, she thought. So,
feigning concern for the food, she swiftly turned away from Thomas Evans and
proceeded to apply a fork to the potatoes, gently prodding them through the
turbulent water in which they were fiercely simmering.
Mr Evans took a seat at the kitchen table
and then vigorously blew his nose.
"At least I haven't lost my appetite," he remarked at length.